Time-Resolved Optical Emission Studies of Pulsed DC Magnetron Plasmas

Pulsed DC unbalanced magnetron sputtering is a well-developed deposition technique for coatings and thin films and is widely used in industry to deposit thin films such as alumina, Al$_{2}$O$_{3}$ and titania, TiO$_{2}$. The pulsed modulation of the direct current (DC) has been demonstrated to create plasmas that solve many of the arcing problems observed in DC magnetrons which can lead to non-uniform removal of material from the anode resulting in poor or unusable thin films for high-tech applications. The intense photon emission from the pulsed DC magnetron sputtering plasmas allows for the investigation of the optical plasma emissions with a fast intensified CCD (ICCD) camera. The non-intrusive diagnostic methods of time-resolved optical emission spectroscopy (TR-OES) and time- resolved imaging were used to study the temporal behavior of the various plasma species.