Tracing and elimination of process-induced contaminations in sputter-deposited targets by elastic recoil detection analysis

Target foils for nuclear physics experiments have been prepared by high vacuum sputter deposition and analyzed for preparation induced contaminations using ERDA (elastic recoil detection analysis) with heavy ions. Sputter deposition has been shown to be a very effective method for the production of thin self-supporting targets, in particular those which cannot be made in certain cases by other techniques. Its low material consumption is of special importance for targets from expensive isotopes. During the development of this sputter deposition technique, contaminants introduced by the preparation method were traced by ERDA and eliminated by appropriate countermeasures.