A transmission electron microscopy study on sputtered ZrB and ZrBN films

Direct current magnetron sputtered ZrB2 thin films on 4H-SiC(0001) and Si(100)

“…This indicates either a textured or an epitaxial growth to 4H-SiC(0001). A 0001 preferred orientation for ZrB2 films deposited on substrate materials such as Si(100), molybdenum, and steel at low growth temperatures has been reported in the literature [7,8,28]. As the substrate temperature is increased the intensity of the 0001 peak reduces and the 0002 peak becomes absent.…”

“…The literature shows that ZrB2 films have been deposited by physical vapor deposition (PVD) [7][8][9][10], as well as chemical vapor deposition (CVD). [11,12].…”

Stoichiometric, epitaxial ZrB2 thin films with low oxygen-content deposited by magnetron sputtering from a compound target: Effects of deposition temperature and sputtering power

“…Some of these studies [12,13,19] report on films with an amorphous structure. Takeyama et al [12] states that their films are amorphous regardless of deposition temperature between RT and 500 °C and that annealing the films at temperatures up to 700 °C for 1 h only results in a slight increase of the intensity of the diffraction peaks, meaning that this temperature is not enough to completely crystallize the films.…”

“…ZrB2 thin films can be synthesized by sputtering from a compound or composite target [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. This is the predominant synthesis route, given the lack of a suitable boron precursor for reactive sputtering.…”

Synthesis and characterization of Cr–B–N coatings deposited by reactive arc evaporation

“…13 However, in multiphase nanostructured coatings, BN is generally found to be present as an amorphous phase. 7,13,14 For other M-B-N (M stands for transition metal) ternary (or quaternary) systems, such as Ti-B-N, 11 Ti-Al-B-N, 13,14 and Zr-B-N, [15][16][17][18][19] it is generally agreed that improvement of the mechanical properties results from a nanocomposite structure where virtually dislocation-free nanometer sized crystallites are separated by one to two monolayers of a strongly bonded amorphous phase at the grain boundaries. The crystallite size and the amorphous phase fraction can be finely adjusted by varying the target composition.…”