MC design and FIB preparation of a YSZ biochemical material microstructure

Aiming at the difficulty of traditional machining of Y2O3-ZrO2 (YSZ) inert ceramic materials, a different method using focused ion beam to selectively create nanoscale microscale structures on the surface of materials was proposed. The sputtering yield, surface damage, and the energy loss of YSZ materials was investigated using the SRIM software using the Monte Carlo method. It is shown that the sputtering yield increases with ion energy in the range 0-30 keV, reaching a maximum of 9.4 atoms/ion at 30 keV. At an ion beam voltage of 30 keV, the most severe damage to the material is 8 mm on the surface. At the same time, the main forms of energy loss in the treatment are phonon energy loss and ionization energy loss, of which phonon energy loss due to the recoil atoms is the largest. In addition, we continue to perform focused ion beam processing experiments on YSZ materials, combining previous MC modeling to optimize different operating conditions such as ion beam, voltage and processing mode. The optimized processing parameters are 30 keV and 2.5 nA. It is shown that the quality of the deep grooves gradually improves with decreasing ion beam current at the same ion beam voltage. However, an excessively small ion beam current leads to an excessively large depth of the deep grooves and lengthy processing times.

Automated summary

The study proposed a new method of using focused ion beam to selectively create nanoscale microscale structures on the surface of YSZ materials, and investigated the sputtering yield, surface damage, and energy loss using Monte Carlo method. Experiments were conducted to optimize processing parameters, resulting in improved quality of deep grooves with decreasing ion beam current.