Nuclear target preparation by a heavy ion sputtering method

Heavy ion sputtering is a powerful method for the preparation of thin target foils of materials with a high melting point. Sputtering by a well collimated beam of about 10 KeV Ar+ ions in a vacuum of 1 x 10-4 Pa also provides a method applicable to very small amounts of enriched isotope. By this method a lot of targets of 50 to 4000 μg/cm2 in thickness have been produced. Further, we have studied various characteristics in the sputtering such as sputtering yield, energy dependence of the sputtering yield and sputtering deposition yield. We consider the method described in this text is applicable to a preparation method with a laser beam heating, which seems to be suited to prepare enriched isotopic targets. (author)