Tailoring growth and local composition by oblique-incidence deposition: a review and new experimental data

Abstract

In this paper features are discussed that are related to the nucleation and growth of thin films deposited by physical vapour deposition. Although the paper is mainly focused on oblique-incidence deposition, a normally-impinging vapour flux will also be described. Two cases of oblique-incidence deposition will be discussed: one obliquely-impinging flux and two obliquely-impinging fluxes from opposite directions. With respect to the microstructure, both similarities and differences between these depositions will be deser~ed. Further, a special feature of two obliquely-impinging vapour fluxes is dealt with, which is the local composition in the lateral direction (parallel to the substrate). The oblique and opposing directions can induce an inhomogeneous chemical composition. This process is referred to as process-induced compositional separation. In addition to reviewing the literature, the paper summarizes experimental data on obliquely co-evaporated Co-Cr, Co-Ag and Co-Ta films. It will be shown from these experimental data that the two vapour directions can be exploited to tailor compositional inhomogeneities.

Micromagnetic Simulation of Magnetization Reversal Processes in Thin Obliquely Deposited Films

“…We note that these numerical results are in a good accordance with the previously reported experimental measurements [2,3].…”

“…Note that the deposition plane is usually defined as a plane that is parallel to the deposited particles flux and orthogonal to the film surface [2]. As an example, Fig.…”

“…In the case of magnetic materials, this columnar microstructure leads to the modification of magnetic properties of the resulting films. By controlling the deposition angle (the angle between a particles flux and a film normal) during films growth, it is possible to produce samples with desirable values of a magnetic uniaxial anisotropy [2] and coercivity [3]. These oblique magnetic films have great potential for use in a wide range of applications, including data storage [4] and microwave devices [5].…”

“…However, while there are numerous experimental investigations of obliquely deposited thin magnetic films (see, for example, Ref. [2]), to our knowledge, only a few theoretical works are present [6,7]. In this work, we use Monte Carlo film growth simulator to generate three-dimensional thin-film structures with columnar morphology for simulation of their magnetic properties by means of micromagnetic modeling.…”

Bending Induced Self-Organized Switchable Gratings on Polymeric Substrates

“…In some materials like SiO2 the tilted nanocolumns tend to aggregate in the form of parallel nanochannels arranged perpendicular to the direction of the incoming flux. This process, known as bundling, 22 has been recently exploited for the fabrication of tunable dichroic optical structures [23][24][25] . As shown in the Supplementary Information S2, room temperature GLAD deposition of SiO2 on PDMS foils (hereafter called G-SiO2/PDMS) yields nanocolumnar thin films where the bundling of the nanocolumns enhances the film in-plane anisotropy 23,24 .…”