2026-09-21T05:35:57Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/82887 2023-07-11 col_2142_5131 col_2142_13836 com_2142_5130 com_2142_13835 com_2142_234

Cahill, David G. Karr, Brian William 2015-09-25T20:53:29Z 2015-09-25T20:53:29Z 10000-01-01 1997 1997 The group IV-B transition metal nitride TiN is widely employed as a wear-resistant coating on mechanical components and as a diffusion barrier in microelectronic devices. I use the epitaxial growth of single crystal TiN as a model system for insight on the evolution of surface morphology and microstructure in more complex polycrystalline films. Atomically-flat MgO substrates, prepared by air annealing at 950$\sp\circ$C for 12 hours, are verified by atomic force microscopy (AFM). Epitaxial TiN layers are grown on MgO(001) by reactive magnetron sputter deposition in pure N$\sb2$ at $\rm650<T\sb{s}<750\sp\circ$C. Without energetic ion bombardment, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) results show that the development of surface morphology is dominated by growth mounds with an aspect-ratio of approximately 0.003; both the roughness amplitude and average separation between mounds follow an approximate power law dependence on film thickness, $t\sp{\gamma},$ with $\gamma=0.25\pm0.07.$ The island edges exhibit dendritic geometries characteristic of limited step-edge mobility. Low-energy N$\sb2\sp+$ ion irradiation during film growth at $\rm T\sb{s}=650\sp\circ$C leads to both surface smoothing and a decrease in the in-plane length scale, by a factor of $\approx$1.4, when V$\rm\sb{s}$ is increased from 3 to 43 V. However, the exponent which describes the roughening and coarsening is unchanged by the ion bombardment. Increasing T$\rm\sb{s}$ to 750$\sp\circ$C reduces the effects of N$\sb2\sp+$ ion bombardment between 3 and 48 V, but increasing $\rm V\sb{s}>48$ V leads to enhanced surface roughening with decreased in-plane length scales resulting from bulk defect production. Made available in DSpace on 2015-09-25T20:53:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license.txt: 4848 bytes, checksum: 96035ab3f5e1c23cc7138a224ce498bd (MD5) 9812649.pdf: 5399177 bytes, checksum: 47346252f186d9358ffb7ac5ad494a57 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1997 Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 84168 Lift date: Forever Reason: Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDs Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDs U of I Only 152 p. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/82887 (MiAaPQ)AAI9812649 eng Engineering, Materials Science Surface Morphology Evolution of Epitaxial TiN(001) Layers Grown by Reactive Magnetron Sputtering text Materials Science and Engineering Materials Science and Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.