Principles and applications of ion beam techniques for the analysis of solids and thin films

This paper reviews in principle and by examples how a collimated mono-energetic and mono-atomic beam incident on a target provides information on its structure and composition when the energy of the back-scattered beam atoms, or of the particles generated by nuclear reactions, is analyzed. Examples are selected with particular emphasis on thin films and Si technology. For convenience, we define three different energy ranges of the incident beam (low energies from 1 to 6 keV, medium energies from 100 to 500 keV and high energies from 1 to 2 MeV) and discuss each range separately, according to the following table of contents.