Sapphire Low Energy Ion Beam Etching Nanometer Structure And Optical Property

Nanometer material has many excellent characteristics. With the development of technology, the research of nanometer material has become deeper all over the world. Thus the development of nanometer material received a high speed. The core research field of this article is the low energy ion beam etching technique which can form nanostructures on the objects’ surfaces. The etching target of this article is sapphire crystal. The reason of choosing sapphire crystal as the target is that sapphire crystal has been used into many fields including optics, chemistry, and machinery. Moreover, nowadays it is the essential material of military optoelectronic devices.In experimental studies microwave cyclotron resonance ion source is selected as the research device. The incident energy and incident angle of etching, etching time and ion beam are the research variables to etching sapphire crystal samples. After etching sapphire .there are three parameters was measured. The first parameter is surface roughness which was measured with the Taylor Sure CCI2000 non-contact surface measuring instrument. The second aspect is the measurement of transmissivity with the spectrophotometer.The third aspect is the measurement of surface nanostructure with the Bruker’s Multimode8 atomic force microscope.Based on the comparison and analysis of the three parameters, draw the following conclusions:1) Under the same conditions of etching time, ion beam, etching angle, the transmittance is increased along with to the increase of the incident energy, but the surface nanometer structure was not effected.2) Under the circumstances of same incident energy, ion beam, etching angle and different etching time from time 60 min to 120 min,the roughness and transmittance of etched sapphire crystal have a slight increase. Moreover, the arrangement of the surface structure which is measured by becomes more orderly.3) Under the circumstances of same etching time and etching angle,the ion beam increases from 35mA to 45mA.The roughness and the transmittance increase slightly.4) Under the fixed parameter, when the roughness of etched sapphire crystal is in the high level the measured surface nanometer structure is more clear and orderly. On the contrary, when the roughness is in the low level the measured surface nanometer structure is relatively stable.