Chemical sputtering of Be due to D bombardment

While covalently bonded materials such as carbon are well known to be eroded by chemical sputtering when exposed to plasmas or low-energy ion irradiation, pure metals have been believed to sputter only physically. The erosion of Be when subject to D bombardment was in this work measured at the PISCES-B facility and modelled with molecular dynamics simulations. During the experiments, a chemical effect was observed, since a fraction of the eroded Be was in the form of BeD molecules. This fraction decreased with increasing ion energy. The same trend was seen in the simulations and was explained by the swift chemical sputtering mechanism, showing that pure metals can, indeed, be sputtered chemically. D ions of only 7 eV can erode Be through this mechanism.