It has never been tried to form a thin film using a strongly ionized plasma by means of a tokamak device. A TiN thin film formation by a reactive sputtering in the tokamak is reported. The tokamak discharge generates a plasma with a high charged particle density, exceeding 10
12 cm
-3, under the condition of an extremely low gas pressure of the order of 10
-5 Torr. Polycrystalline and nearly stoichiometric f. c. c. TiN films were obtained by this new sputtering device. These films have a resistivity of few tens of It μΩ•cm. The surface morphology is very smooth, and no columnar structure can be seen. Such a smooth surface may come from a shadowing effect or an atomic peening because of the low gas pressure. By reducing the input power, a low density plasma (10
11 cm
-3 at peak value) with the dominance of molecular ions was obtained. Under this condition, thin films became amorphous. It means that some energetic species play an important role for obtaining a desirable film formation. We also discuss some prospects of other applications of the strongly ionized tokamak plasma to material processing.
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