Radio frequency ion beam deposition of diamond-like carbon for sliders and heads

Diamond-like carbon prepared by direct ion beam deposition from a filamentless rf ion source has been found to have properties suitable for protective coatings on sliders and heads. One advantage of the rf inductively coupled plasma source used in this study is that it can be operated reliably for hundreds of hours with high concentrations of hydrocarbon gas. We have studied deposition from argon-CH₄ mixtures with 28% to 100% CH₄ and beam energies mainly in the 100 to 400 eV range. X-ray photoemission spectra analysis shows that films prepared with pure CH₄ have less sp³ (diamond-like) bonding than films prepared from mixtures with argon.