Sputtering Yields of CaO, SrO, and BaO by Monochromatic Noble Gas Ion Bombardment

Although MgO is widely used for barrier coating in the current generation of commercial plasma display panel (PDP) cells, other alkaline earth oxides have been studied as alternatives to MgO because some of them have lower discharge breakdown voltages for PDP cells, which would increase energy efficiency of the cells. On the other hand, the resistance against physical sputtering is another critical parameter for barrier coating. In this work, sputtering yields of CaO, SrO, and BaO by monochromatic He+, Ar+, or Kr+ ion beams of normal incidence have been obtained experimentally at relatively low incident energies by a mass-selected ion beam system. Despite the large differences in mass among the target materials, sputtering yields are found to be similar in magnitude among them for a given incident energy. It has been also found that sputtering yields depend weekly on the mass of incident species among Ne+, Ar+, Kr+, and Xe+ ions. (C) 2012 The Japan Society of Applied Physics