It can smooth a wide variety of surface material types to within an angstrom of roughness without subsurface damage.
Reducing the energy decreases the size and depth of the impact craters and, analogous to mechanical polishing where the grit size is reduced during polishing, subsequent treatments with lower energies are used to reach an atomic level smoothness.
[9] Small argon cluster GCIB sources are increasingly used for analytical depth-profiling by secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS).
Argon clusters greatly reduce the damage introduced to the specimen during depth-profiling, making it practical to do so for many organic and polymeric materials for the first time.
[14] A related technique, with a limited range of applications, using high-velocity carbon Fullerenes to treat surfaces, has been studied.
[citation needed] Accelerated neutral atoms beams (ANAB) is a recent variation on GCIB.
[15] With ANAB, the high velocity clusters are heated and evaporated by collisions with thermal energy gas molecules and the charged cluster remnants are deflected out of the beam leaving an intense focused beam of individual fast neutral monomers/atoms.