Electronic sputtering of oxides by high energy heavy ion impact

We have measured sputtering yields of electrically insulating oxides, i.e. amorphous SiO2, Yb-doped SrCeO3 and SrTiO3 in order to investigate the electronic excitation effects on ion-induced atomic displacements, applying a carbon (C)-film collector method. It is found that the sputtering yields are larger by a factor of similar to1000 than the calculated sputtering yields due to the elastic collision cascade, indicating a huge contribution of the electronic excitation effects to the sputtering yields. It also appears that the sputtering yields scale with the square of the electronic excitation density and that the sputtering yields increase steeply with increasing the band gap of the oxides. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.