Abstract
Water cluster ion beam source was developed. Multiply-charged water clusters were generated by ambient or vacuum electrospray. Cluster ions (represented as [(H2O)90,000+100H)]100+) impact the solid sample under vacuum with kinetic energy of 106 eV. Supersonic collisions of water droplets with the surface lead to the atomic/molecular level sample desorption, high-efficiency ionization, and non-selective surface etching without sample modification. By this technique, inorganic materials and organic materials can be etched with etching rates of a few and ≥10 nm/min, respectively. This technique was successfully applied to the interface analysis for CuO/Cu.
