HICS: Highly charged ion collisions with surfaces

The layout of a new instrument designed to study the interaction of highly charged ions with surfaces, which consists of an ion source, a beamline including charge separation and a target chamber, is presented here. By varying the charge state and impact velocity of the projectiles separately, the dissipation of potential and kinetic energy at or below the surface can be studied independently. The target chamber offers the use of tunable metal-insulator-metal devices as detectors for internal electronic excitation, a time-of-flight system to study the impact induced particle emission and the possibility to transfer samples in situ to an ultra high vacuum (UHV) scanning probe microscope. Samples and detectors can be prepared in situ as well. As a first example data on graphene layers on SrTiO3 which have been irradiated with Xe36+ are presented. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.