Adhesion and acoustic emission analysis of failures in nitride films with a metal interlayer

摘要

Interfacial fracture has been induced between a tantalum nitride film with an aluminum inter- layer on a sapphire substrate using nanoindentation. To identify failures for which a model calculation is valid a commercial acoustic emission sensor has been used to study the details of the failure event. The interfacial fracture energy of the system with an aluminum interlayer under the loading conditions at the crack tip is approximately 8 J/m~2. Within narrow bounds, this toughness value is reproducible using three different theoretical approaches.