Study of particulates in AgGeSe thin films deposited by PLD

J. BOBADILLA; J. M. CONDE GARRIDO; J. M. SILVEYRA

Montpellier

Conferencia; European Conference on Applications of Surface and Interface Analysis (ECASIA); 2017

Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) is a technique for fabricating thin films that, because of itssimplicity, offers great experimental versatility. It allows the stequiometric transfer of massfrom the target to the substrate and the physical properties of the films are, in many cases,superior to those obtained by other techniques.The main limit for the application of PLD in micro/nano-devices is the presence ofparticulate at the surface of (and sometimes even inside) the films.In this work, we deposited thin films by PLD of the AgGeSe system on Si wafers. We testedvarious deposition parameters and studied the films through SEM. We present thedependence of the number of particulates and their sizes on the deposition parameters.On examining the targets after ablation, we found that the bigger particulates originate fromthe tips of the cones that form on the target?s surface during the ablation.