Coexistence of colossal stress and texture gradients in sputter deposited nanocrystalline ultra-thin metal films

摘要

This paper demonstrates experimentally that ultra-thin, nanocrystalline films can exhibit coexisting colossal stress and texture depth gradients. Their quantitative determination is possible by X-ray diffraction experiments. Whereas a uniform texture by itself is known to generally cause curvature in so-called sinψ plots, it is shown that the combined action of texture and stress gradients provides a separate source of curvature in sinψ plots (i.e., even in cases where a uniform texture does not induce such curvature). On this basis, the texture and stress depth profiles of a nanocrystalline, ultra-thin (50 nm) tungsten film could be determined.