抄録
In this work, we proposed a method to fabricate continuous metal films of an ultra-thin (<5 nm) thickness at room temperature by low energy Ar+ irradiation. We investigated our method on a 3.6 nm-thick and a 6.0 nm-thick magnetron sputtering deposited Pd films, which were bombarded by 0.8 keV Ar+ at an incident angle of 60 ° at a flux of 3×10^(15) ion/cm^2*s for 1 s to 4 s. The results indicate that the islands of the as-deposited Pd films are flattened by the low dose (< 6×10^(15) ion/cm2) irradiation, which cause the reduction in surface resistance of the 3.6 nm thick Pd films by 100 times. Further analysis have shown that removing Pd atoms by low energy irradiation is till the major procedure which has the sputtering yield for Pd at current irradiation condition of 2.6~2.8 atom/ions.
