Deuterium retention behaviors of boronization films at DIII-D divertor surface

Boron coating of plasma-facing components (PFCs) is widely used in fusion devices to form surface coatings and chemical compounds on the PFCs, thus suppressing plasma contamination by impurities such as oxygen, carbon, and tungsten. Understanding the processes of hydrogenic species retention is crucial to assessing the viability of boron coating techniques in ITER and beyond. In this work, we deposited boronization films on silicon crystal and ITER-grade tungsten samples using a glow discharge boronization plasma of helium (He, 20 %) and diborane (B₂D₆, 80 %) in the DIII-D tokamak at the heated vessel temperature of 600 K. We performed post-mortem analysis of DIII-D boronization films for thickness utilizing a focused ion beam, deuterium retention utilizing thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS), and chemical characterization utilizing X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy. The DIII-D boronization films were exposed to DIII-D tokamak L-, H-mode, and/or PISCES-E linear device D plasmas. We observed a D uptake for B:D = 5:2 in the DIII-D boronization film before D plasma exposures. The observed D retention was mainly in the B[sbnd]C[sbnd]D bond with a desorption peak of 1000 K. No B-D bond with a desorption peak around 700 K was found in the TDS spectrum as the DIII-D vessel was heated to 600 K. Exposures to both DIII-D L- and H-mode D plasma, which includes 1–3 % of C ion contamination, on the DIII-D boronization film at ∼400 K gave a D uptake increase of ∼20 %. Contrarily, D removal by ∼30 % was observed after exposing the DIII-D boronization film to a carbon-free PISCES-E D plasma. This implies that future fusion devices should be careful to minimize C impurity contamination to reduce D retention.