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Al 2 O 3 thin films have been deposited at substrate temperatures between 500• C to 600• C by reactive magnetron sputtering using an additional arbitrary substrate bias to tailor the energy distribution of the incident ions. The films were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR).The film structure being amorphous, nanocrystalline, or crystalline was correlated with characteristic ion energy distributions. The evolving crystalline structure is connected with different levels of displacements per atom (dpa) in the growing film as being derived from TRIM simulations. The boundary between the formation of crystalline films and amorphous or nanocrystalline films was at 0.9 dpa for a substrate temperature of 500 • C. This threshold shifts to 0.6 dpa for films grown at 550 • C.

Articles you may be interested inA reactive magnetron sputtering route for attaining a controlled core-rim phase partitioning in Cu2O/CuO thin films with resistive switching potential Preparation of α -Al 2 O 3 thin films by electron cyclotron resonance plasma-assisted pulsed laser deposition and heat annealing Structure of nitrogenated carbon films prepared from acetylene and nitrogen mixture in electron cyclotron resonance plasma Al 2 O 3 thin films, either amorphous or of varying degrees of crystallinity, were deposited by two-frequency radio-frequency magnetron sputtering. Film crystallinity was investigated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction (XRD). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) was employed to determine the amount of Ar naturally trapped within the films during the deposition process. A clear correlation was found between the existence of crystalline phases, as determined by XRD, and a shift towards lower binding energy positions of the Ar2p core levels of embedded gas. The shift is due to differences in the local Al 2 O 3 matrix (amorphous or crystalline) of the embedded gas, thus, providing an XPS fingerprint that can be used to qualitatively determine the presence or absence of crystalline phases in very thin films. V C 2012 American Institute of Physics.