Eur. Phys. J. D 54, 65-70 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2009-00168-7

Experimental and theoretical studies of the energy-loss straggling of H and He ion beams in HfO₂ films

¹ Departament de Física Aplicada, Universitat d'Alacant, Apartat 99, 03080 Alacant, Spain
² Instituto de Fisica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves 9500, 91501-970, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
³ Departamento de Física - CIOyN, Universidad de Murcia, Apartado 4021, 30080 Murcia, Spain
⁴ División Colisiones Atómicas, Centro Atómico Bariloche, 8400 San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina
⁵ Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, 22290, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

Corresponding author: ^a ias@ua.es

Received: 30 January 2009
Revised: 24 March 2009
Published online: 6 June 2009

Abstract

We report an experimental-theoretical study of the energy-loss straggling of protons and alpha particles in HfO₂ films. In the case of H ions the experiments were performed in the energy range 40–1750 keV. For the lower energy interval (40–250 keV) we have used the medium energy ion scattering (MEIS) technique with a resolution of ΔE/E∼ 4×10^-3, while for the higher energies the Rutherford backscattering technique (RBS) was employed with an overall resolution of 7 keV. Concerning the He ions the straggling study has covered an energy range between 250 and 3000 keV by using RBS measurements, which in this case had a resolution better than 10 keV. The theoretical calculations were done in the framework of the dielectric formalism using the MELF-GOS model to obtain a proper description of the energy loss function (ELF) of the HfO₂ target. It is shown that for both projectiles the experimental data and the theoretical predictions for the energy-loss straggling display a very good agreement.