Application of nuclear methods to the study of transfer wear of PTFE on stainless steel and silicon

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Abstract
Ion beam analysis techniques available at a low‐energy accelerator (<2.5 MV) were utilized to study the transfer wear in the sliding contact of three types of PTFE (Teflon) and stainless steel (AISI 316) or silicon. The methods used include nuclear resonance broadening, back‐scattering, deuteron‐induced reactions, forward recoil spectroscopy, etc. These non‐destructive methods were used to probe the main components of the transferred film and the surface impurities with high sensitivity and reasonable depth resolution (a few nm). These complementary nuclear methods give reproducible results without any special sample pretreatment for insulating polymer films that are a few atomic layers thick. With an optimized measuring geometry, the time of measurement required for a typical accuracy of 1% for the transferred amount was reduced to a few minutes.