Experimental and theoretical studies of the DC reactive magnetron sputtering deposition of silver oxide thin films

In this work we have investigated the AgOX films deposition by DC magnetron reactive sputtering. We have studied the discharge parameters evolution during the different synthesis at several total pressures (5, 10 and 20 mTorr) and reactive gas concentrations (from 0 to 100%). For all the synthesis, the target current stays constant (40 mA). The discharge composition has been obtained by mass spectrometry in the glow discharge mass spectrometry mode and in the residual gas analysis mode. All the prepared films have been analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to measure the samples surface composition. On the other hand, we have modeled the films synthesis by a plasma–surface interaction model and obtained the sticking coefficients of the reactive species O and O2 on the different substrate compounds Ag and Ag2O. We have shown that the main reactions are the reaction between the atomic oxygen and the metallic part of the substrate as we can previous intuitively. From all these results, we have correlated the discharge and the films compositions with the binding energy M–O and compared the results with those obtained for SnOX and TiOX in terms of reactivity for oxygen.