Giant Metal Sputtering Yields Induced by 20–5000 keV/atom Gold Clusters

Very large nonlinear effects have been found in ${\mathrm{Au}}_1$ to ${\mathrm{Au}}_5$ cluster-induced metal sputtering yield measurements over a broad projectile energy interval from 20 keV/atom to 5 MeV/atom. The sputtering yield maxima were found at the same total energy but not at the same energy/atom as expected. For ${\mathrm{Au}}_5$ a yield as high as 3000 was reached at 150 keV/atom while the ${\mathrm{Au}}_1$ yield was only 55 at the same velocity.