How can I improve adhesion of sputtered silver to titanium?

Question

Hey all,
Looking for some insight on some sample preparation for PVD. We've been successfully sputtering silver onto titanium foil that has been previously chemically etched. While this yields very good adhesion, we would like to cut out any process which removes our bulk material (Ti) -- we're working with thin foils to begin with, so etching ~1um of material in order to get good sputter adhesion is bad for us.

So,
We have access to an ion gun, a plasma cleaner, and Ti and Ag sputter targets, and (roughly) any chemical prep that someone would care to suggest. Does anyone have any insight on how to aid our adhesion? We've tried some pretty extensive ion gun runs, with and without ti adhesion layers between 10-60 nm, and we really can't even get mediocre adhesion anywhere on the substrates. Any suggestions? Currently sputtering 500nm Ag @ 40 A/s (about the upper limit on power for our application), ~8 mTorr, under argon.

Thanks in advance,
Joe 

 

Comments

I am sure this is not a forum where you would get an answer, as it is mainly theoretically inclined. Try http://physics.stackexchange.com/ where a lot of applied physicists reply to questions.

---

@annav it is true that the front page looks heavily biased towards theoretical topics, because this seems to be what most of the present activ members are knowledgeable about...

But in principle, all gratuate-level+ questions concerning all valid topics in physics (and the corresponding people are welcome, see also this related discussion.