Growth of stoichiometric Cu3N thin films by reactive magnetron sputtering

Ti substituted nano-crystalline Cu3N thin films

“…Copper nitride thin films with titanium content were deposited by a balanced DC magnetron sputtering from a TiCu single multicomponent target (13 at.% Ti) on ultrasonically cleaned Si(111) single crystals, quartz, and glass slide substrates in the presence of nitrogen atmosphere at sputtering powers of 60 and 80 W. The sputtering powers of £ 100 W are optimum to produce nearly stoichiometric Cu 3 N, and the films formed at powers higher than 100 W are mixed phases of Cu and Cu 3 N. 19,20 The working chamber of the sputtering system was pumped down via a rotary pump and a turbomolecular pump allowing a base pressure of <7 9 10 À4 Pa to be maintained. The total gas pressure, substrate temperature, and the target-substrate distance were kept constant at 1.0 Pa, 150°C and 19 cm, respectively.…”

“…19,20 Although Cu 3 N has been widely studied, little information is available in the literature concerning transition metal-doped Cu 3 N. Recently, some ternary compound based Cu 3 N have been grown; (Pd, Cu)N, 21 (Ti, Cu)N, 22 and (Ag, Cu)N. 23 Also, Moreno-Armenta et al 24 have theoretically studied the effect of metal insertion (M = Ni, Cu, Zn, Pd, Ag, and Cd) at the center of Cu 3 N unit cell on electronic structure. In this study, Ti has been included to the cubic anti-ReO 3 structure of Cu 3 N. The choice of Ti is due to the fact that this element strongly reacts with nitrogen and locally increases nitrogen concentration in the Cu 3 N films.…”

Insertion of Zn atoms into Cu3N lattice: Structural distortion and modification of electronic properties

“…This material has attracted much attention in the past two decades due to its potential technological applications in microelectronics, optical storage, spintronics, and ultra large-scale integrated circuits [1][2][3][4][5]. Note that at low temperatures (100-400 1C) [2,4,[6][7][8], Cu 3 N can easily decompose into metal Cu and nitrogen. Consequently it can be used in the fabrication of microscopic copper lines by maskless direct writing with laser-or electron beams, as write-once optical recording media, etc.…”

Phase stability and oxygen doping in the Cu–N–O system

“…It is a metastable semiconductor and decomposes easily on heating or on ion, electron or laser beam irradiation, which can be used for patterning of structures [1][2][3]. It has been fabricated with different techniques like molecular beam epitaxy [4], pulsed laser deposition [5], atomic layer deposition [6] and reactive magnetron sputtering [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. The metastability and the possibility of varying the band gap of Cu 3 N may offer a unique set of applications to be exploited in areas like microelectronics and optical data storage [1,2,7,10,12,15].…”