Investigation of physical properties of Si crystallites in W/Si multilayers

Abstract

The structural inhomogeneities of silicon films embedded within W/Si multilayer mirrors were studied by X-ray reflection, grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). In the diffuse scattering spectra, evidence of laterally and vertically ordered in-layer inhomogeneities was consistently observed. In particular, specific substructures resonant in nature (named here `ridges') were detected. The properties of the ridges were similar to the roughness determined by quasi-Bragg peaks of scattering, which required a high interlayer correlation of particles. The XPS showed the nanocrystalline nature of the Si particles in the amorphous matrix. The geometric characteristics and in-layer and inter-layer correlations of the nanoparticles were determined. In GISAXS imaging, the unusual splitting of the waists between the Bragg sheets into filament structures was observed, whose physical nature cannot yet be explained.

Investigation of structural and reflective characteristics of short-period Mo/B4C multilayer X-ray mirrors

“…It is possible that, for this structure, a significant contribution to scattering is made by spatial inhomogeneities (individual clusters and crystallites), which are not taken into account by our model, which considers only scattering from interfaces. These effects were observed in multilayer W/Si mirrors, which was considered by Chkhalo, Garakhin, Kumar et al (2022).…”

Multifitting 2: software for reflectometric, off-specular and grazing-incidence small-angle scattering analysis of multilayer nanofilms

“…Examples of the use of Multifitting can be seen in prior work (Chkhalo et al, 2017;Svechnikov et al, 2017Svechnikov et al, , 2018Barysheva et al, 2019;Smertin et al, 2022;Polkovnikov et al, 2022;Pleshkov et al, 2021;Svechnikov et al, 2020;Chkhalo et al, 2022).…”