Abstract

Many aspects of thin film growth can be studied most directly using in-situ techniques. These include a host of critical phenomena which are only observed for very thin layers and are no longer available for study if the film is grown to bulk levels. Although sputter deposition is a very widely used deposition technique both in research and industry, in-situ studies of film growth during sputter deposition are rare. This is primarily because the sputtering gas precludes the use of conventional electron diffraction techniques. Photon based diffraction techniques, on the other hand, are immune to the deleterious effects of the argon sputtering gas and offer a powerful method for investigating film structure provided a source of sufficient brightness is used. We recently performed experiments in which grazing incidence x-ray scattering (GIXS)[1] using synchrotron radiation was implemented in-situ to study film growth by sputter deposition . A special UHV deposition chamber was developed with appropriate x-ray windows and precision sample positioning mechanisms needed in performing a diffraction experiment [2]. During the initial test of this new technique and apparatus, we examined two metal/metal systems: gadolinium/cobalt and molybdenum/nickel.

© 1992 Optical Society of America