A new approach to create isolated carbon particles by sputtering: A detailed parametric study and a concept of carbon particles embedded carbon coatings

This article describes the in-situ creation of isolated carbon particles by quenching argon plasma with helium pulses. The carbon entities are created on the top of diamond-like carbon (DLC) coating by quenching the plasma with He gas during the coating deposition. A general four-phase model is presented to understand the mechanism of in-situ particle formation. The helium based plasma quenching does not produce carbon entities always. Thus, a parametric study is performed which involves the effects He pulse orientation to the plasma plume, He gas flow rate, He injection duration, and the target to substrate distance. The plasma quenching outputs depends on the above-described parameters and the different combinations creates isolated and identical particles or agglomerated entities or homogenous granular coating. He based plasma quenching creates isolated particles in the range of ~ 75 nm to ~ 800 nm with particles isolation distance from less than 1 μm to more than 20 μm at different quenching conditions. After repeatability and confirmation of particles formation with proposed plasma quenching method, the particles are created simultaneously to the DLC deposition. Thus a new coating architecture of isolated carbon particles embedded carbon coating has been developed.