Ion beam damage effects during the low energy cleaning of GaAs

It is shown that ion-beam damage effects in GaAs are significant, even for low energy ion cleaning (≃ 100 eV). Damage from this process results in increasing the saturation current (extrapolated from the forward current) of Au-n-GaAs Schottky barrier diodes by two orders of magnitude. The depth of damage during this process is shown to be unexpectedly large (900 Å) for these low ion-beam energies.