Determination of the Au/SiNx interfacial energy by AFM and FIB tomography

Mechano-stimulated equilibration of gold nanoparticles on sapphire

“…Thus, we can conclude that the AFM-based plastic deformation of the particles can serve as a relatively robust and effective tool for determining the interface energies, significantly accelerating the process of particles equilibration. In this respect, it should be noted that only about 1% of the particles achieved their equilibrium shape in the study of Müller and Spolenak [10] (for comparable initial film thickness and much longer annealing times), compared to 17% of deformed particles in the present study. In overall, statistical method proposed in Ref.…”

“…The aspect ratio of equilibrated particles does not depend on their size. As pointed out by Müller and Spolenak, this means that a straight line marking the upper envelope of the data points describing individual particles in the ''height-lateral size'' space describes truly equilibrated particles [10]. The present data for the indented and tapped particles are shown in Fig.…”

“…The main drawback of the TEM and FIB-based methods, as pointed out in Ref. [10], is labor-and time-consuming sample preparation, which limits the statistical sampling size of the acquired data. Moreover, it is unclear whether the individual particles selected for analysis have reached the state of thermodynamic equilibrium.…”

“…This is why there are very few works in the literature in which the solid-solid interface energy is determined employing the Kaischew-Wulff-Winterbottom analysis of the equilibrium shape of small crystals on substrates. Müller and Spolenak proposed an alternative approach to determining interface energies based on atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements of aspect ratio of a large number of submicrometer-sized particles on a substrate [10]. that the vast majority of particles exhibit an elongated, non-equilibrium shape even after long anneals.…”

“…The morphology of the particles was similar to that observed in Refs. [8,10,[16][17]. A number of selected particles was imaged with the aid of AFM (Park Systems XE-70) and high resolution scanning electron microscope (HR-SEM, Zeiss Ultra plus), and deformed with the aid of AFM-based indentation.…”