Secondary ion and Auger electron emissions from Ar+-ion-sputtered FeAl alloys

Some FeAl alloys, and pure Al and Fe samples, are sputtered in ultrahigh vacuum with Ar⁺ ions between 4 and 15 keV. As previously observed with CuAl alloys, the intensity of the principal Al Auger peak at 63.5 eV is a parabolic function of the Al concentration. Symmetric collisions Al → Al are thus much more efficient for Auger emission from pure aluminium than asymmetric collisions Ar → Al, the proportion of which among effective collisions hardly reaches 20% at 15 keV. Whatever the initial ion energy, the intensities of singly charged atomic secondary ions Al⁺ and Fe⁺, normalized to pure metals, are equal to the atomic concentration of the corresponding elements, whereas the normalized intensities of the multiply charged ions Al²⁺ and Al³⁺ are roughly equal to the square of Al concentration. These results agree with the occurence of two mechanisms in intrinsic ion emission: an electronic excitation process during the separation of the outgoing particle from the target (singly charged ions) and a collisional process from the symmetric collisions Al → Al only, with multiple Auger de-excitation outside the target (multicharged ions of light elements).