Investigation of sputtering and oxygen desorption processes by binary collision approximation method

The peculiarities of the formation of the primary knock-on recoil (PKR) atoms and oxygen desorption processes under conditions of low-energy grazing ion bombardment of clean and O2 covered Ag(1 1 0) surface have been investigated by computer simulation. The present computer code for a calculation of the ion and recoil trajectories is based on the binary collision approximation (BCA). The energy and angular distributions of particles sputtered and desorbed from the surface, as well as their yields have been calculated and studied in detail. It was shown that the main contribution to sputtering comes from first layer of the surface. In the case of grazing angles of incidence the energy of PKR is sufficiently low (1–10% of energy of incident ion). It was shown that due to movement of incident ion in surface channels formed by adsorbed molecules and atoms of surface layers the intensive non-dissociative desorption of adsorbed layer is observed. At low-energy grazing ion bombardment the adsorbed molecules are basically desorbed as molecule, the probability of dissociative desorption increases with increasing the initial energy.