Study of discharge in high-power pulsed magnetron sputtering of a titanium target

This paper experimentally studies a discharge in an argon environment during high-power pulsed magnetron sputtering of a titanium target. The aim of the study was to quantify the influence of independent variables (factors) on the discharge voltage. These included argon pressure, discharge current, pulse duration, and repetition rate. The novelty of the work was the use of active experimentation tactics. The experimental design was developed under the assumption that a mathematical model describing the influence of the selected factors in a relatively narrow range of factor variation can be represented as a first-order polynomial. For this type of model, it was sufficient to vary each factor in the experiment at two levels. The experiments were performed on a bal-anced cylindrical magnetron. A type 24–1 fractional factorial experimental design was used, containing eight different experiments. The resulting adequate model was used to study the discharge in detail. In particular, the influence of each of the identified factors on discharge voltage, power, and pulse energy was determined, with the other factors remaining constant. Pulse duty cycle was introduced as an additional factor.

Authors: V. I. Shapovalov, D. S. Sharkovskii, A. V. Nikolaev

Direction: Physics

Keywords: magnetron sputtering, design of experiment, full factorial experiment, fractional factorial experiment, magnetron target, model, polynomial, titanium

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