Proceedings of the
9th International Conference of Nanomanufacturing (nanoMan2024)
December 1 – 4, 2024, Singapore
Unraveling the Material Removal and Step Morphology Evolution Mechanism of Plasma Processed Sapphire Surfaces
Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, P. R. China.
ABSTRACT
Sapphire (Al2O3) can be used in many fields, such as semiconductor, national defense and precision optics. Because it has excellent corrosion resistance, wear resistance, and light transmission. However, it is a typical difficult-to-machine material due to its high hardness and brittle characteristics. In order to pursue better performance of sapphire components, the atomically smooth surfaces of sapphire are necessary for them. In this work, the inductively coupled plasma (ICP) polishing in atmospheric environment was conducted on sapphire materials. The results show that the plasma continuous processing time is a key factor for removing the defect layer of the original sapphire surface. Multiple accumulations processing cannot achieve similar polishing quality with a single processing even though the total processed time is same. Besides, the surfaces after plasma processed topography exhibit directional etching pits. Furthermore, the effect of oxygen-containing groups in plasma is analyzed on the surface topography of sapphire. The step morphology of sapphire was achieved by tuning the processing parameters of plasma.
Keywords: Sapphire, Defect, Polishing, Step-morphology, Plasma.
