Hydrogenated amorphous carbon thin films deposited by plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition enhanced by electrostatic confinement: structure, properties, and modeling
| Autor: | Cesar Aguzzoli, F. Cemin, M.E.H. Maia da Costa, M. R. F. Soares, Carlos A. Figueroa, S. M. M. Dufrène, Israel Jacob Rabin Baumvol |
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| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Applied Physics A. 117:1217-1225 |
| ISSN: | 1432-0630 0947-8396 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s00339-014-8510-4 |
| Popis: | Hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) is a state-of-the-art material with established properties such as high mechanical resistance, low friction, and chemical inertness. In this work, a-C:H thin films were deposited by plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition. The deposition process was enhanced by electrostatic confinement that leads to decrease the working pressure achieving relative high deposition rates. The a-C:H thin films were characterized by elastic recoil detection analysis, Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and nanoindentation measurements. The hydrogen content and hardness of a-C:H thin films vary from 30 to 45 at% and from 5 to 15 GPa, respectively. The hardness of a-C:H thin films shows a maximum as a function of the working pressure and is linearly increased with the shifting of the G-peak position and I D/I G ratio. The structure of a-C:H thin films suffers a clustering process at low working pressures. A physical model is proposed to estimate the mean ion energy of carbonaceous species arriving at the surface of a-C:H thin films as a function of processing parameters as pressure and voltage and by considering fundamentals scattering events between ion species and neutral molecules and atoms. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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