Structure and properties of GLC films deposited by PEMS

Abstract

In this paper, an unbalanced plasma enhanced magnetron sputtering system was adopted to deposit four types of the graphite-like carbon (GLC) films under different currents of ion source. The results show that a moderate Ar⁺ bombardment effectively adjusts the content of sp³ hybrid structure, and significantly improves the film’s compactness. With the increase of ion source current, the hardness, H/E and H³/E² ratios of the film present a change rule of increasing first and decreasing subsequently, and all achieve their maximum values under the ion source current of 10 A. Moreover, the average values of the studied GLC films are all below 0.05 with slight fluctuation, while the wear rate of the film presents a significant difference with the increase of ion source current. Especially, when the ion source current is 10 A, the friction coefficient and the wear rate of the GLC films are 0.01 and 1.7 × 10⁻¹⁶ m³ N⁻¹ m⁻¹, respectively, presenting excellent tribological properties.

Keywords:

• Graphite-like carbon films
• Ion source
• Ar⁺ bombardment
• Tribological properties

Acknowledgements

The paper was financially supported by NSFC (51535011).