Hysteresis effect during reactive sputtering

In this work, we studied the effect of constant parameters of the sputtering system on the width of the hysteresis loop during reactive sputtering. The sticking coefficient of the reactive gas to the surface, the chamber pumping speed, the target area, etc. are taken as parameters. The comparative study was carried out by numerical solution of systems of algebraic equations describing the chemisorption and physicochemical models of metal target reactive sputtering in a single reactive gas. The calculations were performed for sputtering a tantalum target in an Ar + O2 mixture. The studied dependences were non-linear in all cases.