The process involves bombarding layered samples with doses of ion radiation in order to promote mixing at the interface, and generally serves as a means of preparing electrical junctions, especially between non-equilibrium or metastable alloys and intermetallic compounds.
During this ballistic process, energies of impinging ions displace atoms and electrons of the target material several lattice sites away, resulting in relocations there and interface mixing at the boundary layer.
Advantages of ion beam mixing as a means of synthesis over traditional modes of implantation include the process' ability to produce materials with high solute concentrations using lower amounts of irradiation, and better control of band gap variation and diffusion between layers.
[3][5] The cost of IM is also less prohibitive than that of other modes of film preparation on substrates, such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).
Ion beams cannot be perfectly directed, nor the collision cascade controlled, once IM effects propagate, which can result in leaking, electron diffraction, radiation enhanced diffusion (RED), chemical migration and mismatch.