Morphology and chemical composition of carbon sputter targets

Summary form only given. The protective carbon overcoat in magnetic recording disk media is usually produced by sputtering graphite. To achieve different physical properties, nitrogen, hydrogen, and hydrocarbon, in addition to Ar gas, is used to produce various forms of amorphous carbon (a-C) like hydrogenated a-C, nitrogenated a-C, and hybrid a-C which contains a both nitrogen and hydrogen. In this paper, we investigated the morphology and chemical composition changes of graphite targets that has undergone magnetron sputtering. The surface morphology is examined using optical microscopy, atomic force microscopy and secondary electron microscopy. Surface chemical composition and carbon structure changes are studied using Raman spectroscopy as well as Auger electron spectroscopy (AES).