Atomic rearrangement of sputtered amorphous carbon nitride thin films during growth

Effect of air post contamination on mechanical properties of amorphous carbon nitride thin films

“…The XPS measurements confirm this result and indicate that the N/C atomic ratio decreases from 0.55 down to 0.15 for the range of the studied RF power. The liberated nitrogen atoms recombine to form N 2 molecules, which can either diffuse to the surface or remain inside the film inducing the formation of voids (low density) [4,5,10]. Supporting evidence for the above arguments arises from the ERDA and NRA measurements, which reveal a systematic presence of a significant amount of hydrogen and oxygen.…”

“…In addition, the porous character of our samples, due to the formation of local termination of the 3D network during growth, i.e. CbN bonds, that interrupts the network connectivity (voids), can affect strongly the physicalmechanical properties of the thin films [5,12,19,20]. So, to analyse the correlation between the microstructure evolution under different RF powers and the resulting mechanical properties of our samples, we assume that the deposited a-CN x is composed of a large number of distinct configurations as well as some heterogeneous inclusions and voids.…”

“…It is obvious that dealing with such a controversial picture, models and experimental techniques related to the structural characterization of carbon nitride thin films are of primary interest [2,3,5]. The CN x films are generally amorphous (a-), contain a mixture of sp 2 and sp 3 sites and can be prepared by different techniques [2,3,6,7].…”

“…The microstructure and the resulting properties of a-CN x films deposited at room temperature have been widely studied. They are usually analyzed in terms of N content and C-N bonding, which affect the relative ratio and the spatial correlation of Csp 3 and Csp 2 sites [1][2][3][4][5][6][7].…”

Amorphous carbon nitride thin films for electrochemical electrode: Effect of molecular structure and substrate materials

“…There was a large absorption region between 1000 cm À1 and 1800 cm À1 for the bending vibration mode of the N-PAH skeleton. The peaks around 1200 cm À1 , 1500 cm À1 , and 1700 cm À1 can be attributed to sp 3 C-N bonds, PAH bending modes, and C@N double bonds, respectively [5,24,25,31]. Meanwhile, small nitrogen-related absorption peaks were observed around 2200 cm À1 and between 3000 cm À1 and 3500 cm À1 .…”