From sputtering to glow discharge

[Terje Dokland]

Thanks to all who have given very helpful advice regarding this. I 
just thought I'd share the comments with the list for the benefit of 
everybody who might be interested. Hope I got everything right!

Basically, the sputter coater itself works ok as a glow discharge 
device, with the side effect of getting gold on your grid. This may 
or may not be a problem in practice.

A simple solution may be to reduce the current to 5-10mA (while 
normal sputtering is done at >20mA) if it is possible, and increase 
the distance between target and grids.

It was also suggested was to remove the gold target and use the steel 
or Aluminium underneath or to replace it with either tungsten foil or 
titanium.

Also, glow discharge should be done in air with a pressure of 
~100mTorr, not in Argon, which is normally used to improve sputtering 
efficiency.

Another suggestion was to reverse the polarity, in which case one 
would, in effect, be cleaning the grids instead of sputtering metal 
onto them. Whether this is possible may depend on the design of the 
sputter coating unit.

terje
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