Sputtering Yield Amplification (SYA) is a phenomenon involving the modification of collision cascades induced by momentum transfer on a target's surface through the addition of heavy dopant atoms. This process enhances the emission of target atoms, typically lighter than the dopants. In our study, we employed small pieces of three doping materials (Ta, Mo, and Cu) to generate individual film...
The Sputtering Yield Amplification, SYA, phenomenon discovered by S. Berg in 1996. Consists of increasing the sputtering yield value by doping the target surface with generally heavier elements; modifying the collision cascade, promoting the increase in the number of deposited atoms on the substrate. However, there are cases in which certain combinations of elements do not produce SYA, in the...
An automation system was designed and implemented, using ARDUINO, that allows us to continuously measure the environmental conditions and know the corresponding dew point at which we will obtain condensed water in the collection system. Specifically, this system uses a copper plate in good thermal contact with a Peltier cell. From the temperature and humidity obtained with a DHT11 sensor, and...
The effect of cascade excitations of Fermi-level electrons on the lineshape of photoemission spectra was treated by Doniach and Sunjic (DS) in 1970.1 Their derived lineshape has many issues such as its lack of integrability and failure to closely reproduce experimental data.2 We analyze this problem using a formalism rooted only in the basic quantum mechanics of resonances with a minimalist...
The surface temperature of a 2” diameter water-cooled titanium target was measured, using an electrically floating fine, 0.005” wire, type K chromel-alumel thermocouple, during sputtering as a function of the DC plasma power (power densities of 1.0, 2.2 and 4.1 W/cm2) and gas pressures of 10 to 60 sccm. The temperature difference between the centre of the target and inside the racetrack was...
Carbon layers of different thicknesses were evaluated as protective layers on titanium to prevent metal oxidation. Titanium films (99.95% purity) 100 nm thick were deposited on Si (100) in a high-vacuum magnetron sputtering system with a working pressure of 5 mTorr. A Pinnacle source with 150 Watts and 20 kHz was used. The target contained surface oxide which was deposited on the substrate....
High Entropy Alloys, HEA, since their introduction in 2004 by Yeh and Cantor have been seen to have superior properties to conventional metallic alloys. In recent years efforts have been made to develop HEAs with beneficial properties for the industry. For example, increased hardness, wear, and temperature resistance. In the present work, we studied the synthesis of a Multi-Elemental Alloy,...
In this work we will show the fit of some of the transition metals of the sixth period, using the Double Lorentzian line shape, specifically the 4f orbitals with their two branches 7/2 and 5/2 and the background used will be the Shirley-type background (SVSC). The fits were performed with the AAnalyzer© software and shared on the web at the https://xpsoasis.org/ platform. The use of the DL...
Aluminum, a reactive metal, rapidly reacts with oxygen to form a protective aluminum oxide layer. It has three electrons in its valence shell, allowing it to form oxidation states of Al+1 and Al+2, with Al+3 being the most stable oxidation state.
Film deposition of metallic aluminum (99.99% pure aluminum pellets from Sigma Aldrich) through thermal sublimation under ultra-high vacuum...
The XPS equipment at the Laboratorio de Procesamiento y Caracterización de Nanopelículas (LPCN) at Cinvestav-Querétaro, is one of the oldest XPS pieces of equipment that still provides high-quality data. Besides basic issues such as keeping it clean and employing a low base pressure (in the 10-10 Torr range), two of the reasons that have kept this equipment competitive are the following:
1)...
X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) is renowned for its acute sensitivity to surface characteristics, which enables detailed quantitative analysis of the elemental and chemical state of surface layers up to approximately 10 nanometers deep. XPS is extensively employed across various industrial and academic settings due to the widespread availability of commercial systems that facilitate...
Neodymium oxide is a material highly used in different applications fields, such as, optoelectronics and biomedical.
Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) was used as a synthesis method to grow thin films at different pressures, going from 2x10$^{-5}$ Torr to 1x10$^{-2} $ Torr. For the experiments, a 2 inches neodymium disk was used as target. It was ablated with a pulsed Nd:YAG laser emitting at...
Semiconductor materials by nature have high optical transparency and are good electrical insulators, but we can improve their properties through some impurification or also called doping, obtaining materials with high optical and electrical transparency. Transparent conductive oxides or also called TCO's are electrically conductive materials with high optical transparency. They are used in a...
In this experimental study, the focus was on characterizing the plasma generated during the production of ZrO₂-Ni films using a Co-Sputtering system. The primary objective is to analyze the plasma through optical emission spectroscopy (OES) to identify the density of emitted species (ions and electrons), the electron temperature, and to correlate these characteristics with the structure and...
Silver nanoparticles were deposited on glass substrates by means of PLD. Two fluence values were used for the experiments, 2.5 and 8.3 J/cm2. Four films were grown for each fluence changing the number of pulses (300, 600, 900 and 1200 pulses). The laser produced plasmas were diagnosed by means of Langmuir probe measurements, from which time of flight curves (TOF) were obtained. Mean kinetic...
Thin films were deposited from the ablation in vacuum of a bulk BaTiS$_{3}$ perovskite target with a Nd:YAG laser emitting at 1064 nm with 10 Hz repetition rate and 6 ns pulse duration. The output energy per pulse of the laser is 750 mJ. However, for the present experiments, the energy was attenuated by the use of a polarizing beam attenuator in order to change the energy density (fluence)...
The aim of research is to evaluate how the nitrogen flow in a HiPIMS system affected plasma and microstructural characterization during the deposition of TiAlTaNbZrN. First, the synthesis conditions for producing the TiAlTaNbZr metallic coatings were optimized by varying the pressure and substrate bias in orden to identify the best conditions in terms of FCC structure (using X-Ray Diffraction...
The main peak of most of the p, d, and f X-ray photoemission spectra from transition metals exhibit an asymmetry that extends towards the high binding energy side. This asymmetry is observed also in some oxides. The asymmetry in peaks of photoemission spectra arises from a non-symmetric distribution of the final states of the core hole. These states can be related to multiplet...
Hafnium-based materials have been crucial in electronic devices in the last few years. Current challenges are species migration and the growth of an interfacial layer (mainly after annealing), both hindering device performance. Nitridation is a possible solution. ARXPS provides non-destructive depth profiling information, offering valuable insights to understand the nitridation mechanism. ...
