Nick Lam

Camilla Cummings
UNST: Life Unlimited Mentor Section
18 May 2015
Plasma Sputtering
After main section was over (10:45), I went to the Smith (SMSU) Ballroom, room 355, to
look at the posters. I stumble across a poster called Plasma Sputtering. The presenter was
named Nicholas Sayre and he was an engineering major. I thought his poster was interesting
because I saw the word cathode and anode. I had just learn those terms in chemistry and I
thought it would be helpful to me if I learned about plasma sputtering.
Basically plasma sputtering is a technique used to deposit thin films of a material onto a
surface. Gaseous plasma will be placed into the plasma sputtering, which will accelerate the ions
from the plasma into some sort of source material. Plasma is sometimes called the fourth state of
matter because it is going beyond the gas state which is actually a dynamic condition where all
the neutral gas atoms, ions, electrons and photons exist in a near balanced state simultaneously.
Although I forgot what Nicholas was trying to find, he explained the process of
sputtering to me because I was so interested on how this technology works. First you have to
place the target material and the substrate into a vacuum chamber. Some amount of voltage is
applied between them so that the target is the cathode and the substrate is attached to the anode.
What I learned from chemistry, anode is a process of losing electrons and cathode is the process
of gaining electrons. The next process was kind of confusing to me because, apparently, a plasma
is created by ionizing a sputtering gas and the sputtering gas is bombarding the target. Even
though I am taking a full year of chemistry, I was still confused about this process on making a
plasma. Even asking questions didnt really help and I had a confused face. I think I was just
really tried to understand what was happening.
What I understood the most was that controlling the plasma was hard because you need
the right pressure to sustain a plasma. At low pressures, there arent enough collisions between
atoms and electrons to sustain it. Whereas, high pressures will have too many collisions that the
electrons do not have enough time to gather their energy and will unable to ionize the atoms.
I thought Nicholas research was great and he was good at explaining his materials and
my question, but I was still confused when he answered them. This was outside my range of
knowledge and it was great to be exposed to new research because I never knew about this.