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A. Golczewski, A. Kuzucan, K. Schmid, J. Roth, M. Schmid, F. Aumayr:
"Ion-induced erosion of tungsten surfaces studied by a sensitive quartz-crystal-microbalance technique";
Journal of Nuclear Materials, 390-391 (2009), 1102 - 1105.

A highly sensitive quartz-crystal-microbalance (QCM) technique was used to study erosion of polycrystalline
tungsten films due to impact of deuterium, carbon and argon ions, as well as retention of deuterium
in these films. Polycrystalline tungsten films coated onto a SC-cut quartz crystal were bombarded by
ions with impact energies from 100 eV up to a few keV and the frequency change due to mass loss (sputtering,
desorption) or mass gain (implantation, adsorption) during bombardment was determined. Our
setup was capable of detecting mass-changes as small as 10 5 lg/s, which corresponds to a removal
(or deposition) of only 10 4W monolayers/s. While our total sputtering yields for deuterium and argon
projectiles compare well with the results of previous work, we derive new data on sputtering of tungsten
by carbon ions. In addition we demonstrate that our setup is well suited for determining deuterium
retention rates in tungsten.