Electron microscope structure and internal stress in thin silver and gold films deposited onto MgF2 and SiO substrates

Mechanical stress and stress release channels in 10–350 nm palladium hydrogen thin films with different micro-structures

“…The stress changes are repeated with systematically changing increments and maximum stresses. Table 1 summarizes the resulting stress quantities for Initially stress is linked to the surface tension of isolated islands [39]. During further growth, stress is enhanced by atom peening [40,41], mainly caused by the sputter gas atoms and predominantly acting in Pd films sputtered at 300 K. According to our data, peening related defects recover at 673 K.…”

Time-domain and energetic bombardment effects on the nucleation and coalescence of thin metal films on amorphous substrates

“…The sign of the slope of the stress-thickness product curve as a function of the film thickness gives the sign of the stress where, by convention, negative values signify compressive stress and positive values signify tensile stress. For films grown under high mobility conditions (encountered when depositing Ag at room temperature) a compressive-tensilecompressive stress evolution is commonly observed upon film thickening [22][23][24][25][26]. It has been shown [25,26] that the tensile-to-compressive transition coincides with the completion of the coalescence and the formation of a continuous film.…”

“…For films grown under high mobility conditions (encountered when depositing Ag at room temperature) a compressive-tensilecompressive stress evolution is commonly observed upon film thickening [22][23][24][25][26]. It has been shown [25,26] that the tensile-to-compressive transition coincides with the completion of the coalescence and the formation of a continuous film. This transition can be seen in Figure 1, where the stress evolution in a film deposited at f=50 Hz and E p =20 mJ is plotted as a function of the nominal film thickness.…”

On the residual stress developed in the nanostructure of computer simulated thin films

“…According to a stress model developed by Abermann [18] and Koch [19] for Volmer-Weber growth, two different mechanisms are responsible for the compressive and tensile stress contributions. In this model the compressive stress in the postcoalescence stage actually originates from compressive strain built up in the precoalescence stage [20]. In the precoalescence stage, since the lattice spacing of the isolated islands is smaller than in the bulk owing to a Laplace pressure (i.e., surface tension or stress) [21] and a reduced lattice spacing is frozen-in at the percolation stage [22].…”