“…For the purpose of thin-film synthesis, these reactions can be categorized into two groups: one based on interdiffusion processes between a film and a substrate during post-deposition thermal annealing and the other based on reaction processes inside the film itself. For MAX phases, the most well-known example of the first category of reactions is Ti 3 SiC 2 synthesized by annealing of Ti-based contacts deposited onto SiC substrates, to form ohmic contacts in SiC-based semiconductor devices [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. The second category is deposition of a film containing the three elements M, A, and X in a metastable state, e.g., amorphous [24,25,26] or an artificial multilayer [27,28,29,30], followed by annealing above the deposition temperature, to initiate transformation to the MAX phase.…”