Status of ion microbeam facility at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar,India

An ion microbeam facility has been set up at one of the beam lines of the 3 MV tandem Pelletron accelerator facility at IOP, Bhubaneswar. This is the first facility of its kind in India, having potential applications in the g rowing fields involving semiconductors, materials science, biology, archeol ogy and environmental science, from both scientific and industrial points o f view. So far we have achieved a spatial resolution of similar to3 mum wit h a beam current of about 80 pA using a 3 MeV He+ beam. A brief description of various components along with the experimental setup is given. As first applications of this microprobe, elemental maps, obtained by RBS measureme nts on epitaxial gold silicide islands grown on Si(1 1 0) surfaces, and res ults of mass transport in ion beam interaction with a Ag(1 1 1) epitaxial l ayer are presented. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.