Thin films of hafnium oxide have been grown by high pressure reactive sputtering on transparent quartz substrates (UV-grade silica) and silicon wafers. Deposition conditions were adjusted to obtain polycrystalline as well as amorphous films. Optical properties of the films deposited on the silica substrates were investigated by transmittance and reflectance spectroscopy in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared range (UV-VIS-NIR). A numerical analysis method that takes into account the different surface roughness of the polycrystalline and amorphous films was applied to calculate the optical constants (refractive index and absorption coefficient). Amorphous films were found to have a higher refractive index and a lower transparency than polycrystalline films. This is attributed to a higher density of the amorphous samples, which was confirmed by atomic density measurements performed by heavy-ion elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA). The absorption coefficient gave an excellent fit to the Tauc law (indirect gap), which allowed to obtain a band gap value of 5.54 eV. The structure of the films (amorphous or polycrystalline) was found to have no significant influence on the nature of the band gap. The Tauc plots also give information about the structure of the films, because the slope of the plot (the Tauc parameter) is related to the degree of order in the bond network. The amorphous samples had a larger value of the Tauc parameter, i.e., more order than the polycrystalline samples. This is indicative of a uniform bond network with percolation of the bond chains, in contrast to the randomly oriented polycrystalline grains separated by grain boundaries.2

The optical and vibrational properties of the quaternary chalcopyrite semiconductor alloy Ag x Cu 1x GaS 2

Hydrogen and nitrogen release processes in amorphous silicon nitride dielectrics have been studied by MeV ion scattering spectrometry in combination with infrared spectroscopy. The outdiffusion of those light constituents was activated by the thermal energy supplied to the samples by rapid thermal annealing treatments. Molecular models of how these reactions proceed have been proposed based on the information obtained from the infrared spectra, and the validity of the models has been tested by an analysis of the activation energy of the desorption processes. For this purpose, the evolution of the hydrogen concentration versus the annealing temperature was fitted to an Arrhenius-type law obtained from a second-order kinetics formulation of the reactions that are described by the proposed structural models. It was found that the low values of the activation energies can be consistently explained by the formation of hydrogen bonding interactions between Si-H or N-H groups and nearby doubly occupied nitrogen orbitals. This electrostatic interaction debilitates the Si-H or N-H bond and favors the release of hydrogen. The detailed mechanism of this process and the temperature range in which it takes place depend on the amount and the proportion of hydrogen in Si-H and N-H bonds. Samples with higher nitrogen content, in which all bonded hydrogen is in the form of N-H bonds, are more stable upon annealing than samples in which both Si-H and N-H bonds are detected. In those nitrogen-rich films only a loss of hydrogen is detected at the highest annealing temperatures.

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