Deposition of iron containing amorphous carbon films by filtered cathodic vacuum arc technique

Iron containing amorphous carbon (a-C:Fe) films have been deposited with an Fe/graphite composite target with different Fe content by filtered cathodic vacuum arc (FCVA) technique. X-Ray induced photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) was used to analyze the Fe content in the films. Micro-Raman spectroscopy was employed to characterize the structural changes of a-C:Fe films. The properties of the a-C:Fe films such as the intrinsic stress, morphology and roughness investigated by the profiler, atomic force microscope (AFM). The XPS results show that there exists small amount of oxygen in the form of FeO in the films and the Fe fraction in the films is always larger than that in the target. Compared with pure amorphous carbon films the intrinsic stress was effectively reduced by incorporating Fe into the films, and decreases with increasing Fe content. As increasing the Fe content, the clusters in the films become finer and the roughness increases The studies of Raman spectra show that the positions of G peak and D peak shift to low and high wavenumbers, respectively, and the ratio of the intensity of D and G peaks increases with an increase in Fe content, that suggests that the sp2-bonded carbon and the size of the sp2-bonded cluster increases with an increase in the Fe content.