Heteroepitaxial growth of TiN film on MgO (100) by reactive magnetron sputtering

Abstract

TiN thin films were deposited on MgO (100) substrates at different substrate temperatures using rf sputtering with Ar/N2 ratio of about 10. At 700°C, the growth rate of TiN was approximately 0.05 μm/h. The structural and electrical properties of TiN thin films were characterized with x-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Hall measurements. For all deposition conditions, XRD results show that the TiN films can be in an epitaxy with MgO with cube-on-cube orientation relationship of (001)TiN // (001)MgO and [100]TiN // [100]MgO. TEM with selected-area electron diffraction pattern verifies the epitaxial growth of the TiN films on MgO. SEM and AFM show that the surface of the TiN film is very smooth with roughness approximately 0.26 nm. The minimum resistivity of the films can be as low as 45 μΩ cm.

Hybrid magneto photonic material structure for plasmon assisted magnetic switching

“…Note that the 10nm Ta overlayer exhibits also no crystalline peaks, indicative that Ta grows amorphous on the amorphous CoCrPtTa seed layer. This is consistent with the phase transformation in CoCrPt reported by Lee and Kim [23] when the alloy is doped with >6% Ta. Beginning with a Ta content of 30% in the seed layer, diffraction peaks corresponding to (101 " 0) and (0002) planes of an hcp unit cell can be observed.…”

“…Epitaxial TiN (001) exhibits plasmonic properties comparable to Au and is thermally and mechanically stable at high temperatures [14,[18][19][20]. It can be grown epitaxially onto csapphire [18,21] Si [22], and MgO (001) [23] substrates. In this work, we employ reactive sputtering of Ti in Ar + N2 atmospheres to grow epitaxial films on substrates held at 800 o C [14,20].…”

Remote Sensing of High Temperatures with Refractory, Direct-Contact Optical Metacavity

“…Various sputtering process parameters as well as substrates have been shown to affect the grown thin film properties and have been optimized to obtain the best achievable optical quality. Commercially available crystalline magnesium oxide (MgO) substrates are used for this study due to a close match of MgO lattice constant to that of titanium nitride (TiN). , The lattice match leads to a preferential single crystalline growth of TiN film on MgO, as has been confirmed experimentally in an earlier work . Si 3 N 4 films are deposited in a tube furnace (ProTemp) using low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) technique at 800 °C using silane (SiH 4 ) and ammonia (NH 3 ) gas chemistry.…”

“…The plasmonic behavior of TMNs is critically dependent on their fine crystal structure, which is largely affected by the growth conditions as well as the nature of the underlying layer. Single crystalline magnesium oxide is used as a bottom-most substrate as its lattice constant matches closely to that of TiN, promoting the epitaxial, single-crystalline growth of the TiN. , When grown on top of a Si 3 N 4 layer, the amorphous nature of the dielectric promotes a polycrystalline structure of the TiN thin film with reduced metallicity and increased optical losses . To account for these effects, we measure the temperature-dependent complex dielectric permittivity spectrum of each of the constituent material layers of the metamaterial device, namely, epitaxial TiN deposited on the MgO substrate, Si 3 N 4 , and polycrystalline TiN deposited on Si 3 N 4 .…”

Atomic and electronic structure of the TiN/MgO interface from first principles

“…Recently, TiN has been grown on supporting materials like MgO by various methods and the microstructure of the TiN/MgO interface was characterized, but without a detailed picture of both the atomic and electronic structure [5][6][7].…”