Growth of tetrahedral amorphous carbon film: Tight-binding molecular dynamics study

Effect of ECR-assisted microwave plasma nitriding treatment on the microstructure characteristics of FCVA deposited ultra-thin ta-C films for high-density magnetic storage applications

“…With increasing nitrogen content, there is less G peak dispersion and more ordering of structure. Furthermore, appropriate nitriding treatment (substrate bias: À100 V, N 2 flow: 150 sccm) can greatly increase the fraction of sp 3 and sp 3 C-N bonds, but the values begin to fall when the N content is above 9.8 at.%. All these indicate that suitable ECRassisted microwave plasma nitriding is a potential modification method to obtain ultra-thin ta-C film with higher sp 3 and sp 3 C-N fractions for high-density magnetic storage applications.…”

“…Tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) films attract more attention recently as a promising material for electronic, optical, biomedical and wear protection applications because of their desirable properties, such as wide band gap, high hardness, excellent wear resistance, low friction coefficient, high thermal stability and chemical inertness [1][2][3]. The filtered cathodic vacuum arc (FCVA) technique has been proved very successful and particularly suitable for mass industrialization for the deposition of high quality ta-C films with high sp 3 fraction [4,5].…”

Size dependence of nanostructures: Impact of bond order deficiency

“…As demonstrated, the atomic CN imperfection and the large portion of surface/interface atoms play key roles in determining the performance of small structures. Recent tight-binding potential MD calculations of tetrahedron carbon (t-C) graphitization by Zheng et al [688] reveal that the graphitization of t-C cluster with hundreds of atoms happens at a temperature that is 10% higher than that measured (1100e 1200 K). A first-principle calculation [689] predicted that the hardness of the optimal BC 2 N structure is lower than the measured extreme hardness of BC 2 N nanocomposites.…”

Stress reduction of Cu-doped diamond-like carbon films from ab initio calculations

“…But most of the previous computational results focused on the mechanism of sp 3 bond formation and the dependence of the atomic bond structure on the kinetic energy of the deposited species in pure carbon or hydrocarbon system. [7][8][9] In contrast, computational study on the metal element addition in DLC films is highly limited, especially for the direct simulation of the Me-DLC film growth by classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Recently, we 10 reported the bond characteristics between all transition metal (TM) atoms and C atom by ab initio calculation using tetrahedral bond model, and revealed that as the 3d electrons of doped TM increased, the bond characteristic between the TM and C atoms changed from bonding (Sc, Ti) to nonbonding (V, Cr, Mn, Fe) and finally to antibonding (Co, Ni, Cu), which accounted for the change of total energy caused by distorting the bond angles.…”