The strength of metal crystals is reduced below the theoretical value by the presence of dislocations or by flaws that allow easy nucleation of dislocations. A straightforward method to minimize the number of defects and flaws and to presumably increase its strength is to increase the crystal quality or to reduce the crystal size. Here, we describe the successful fabrication of high aspect rati...

A helicon antenna that sits remotely outside the vacuum system is attached to a magnetron sputtering system. This increases the electron temperature, which increases the ionization of the sputter flux for achieving ionized physical vapor deposition (IPVD). There are no shadowing and contamination problems, unlike other IPVD devices with immersed coils, since the helicon antenna is outside the v...

Interconnects, once the technological backwater of integrated circuit technology, now dominate integrated circuit cost and performance. As much as 90 percent of the signal delay time in future integrated circuit designs will be due to the interconnection of semiconductor devices while the remaining 10 percent is due to transistor-related delay. This shifts the thrust of critical research toward...

This work presents a proposed mechanism for fabricating Y-shaped nanorods, demonstrates the feasibility of the proposal through classical molecular dynamics simulations, and validates the simulations through magnetron sputter deposition experiments. The proposed mechanism relies primarily on the formation of stacking faults during deposition and to a lesser degree on diffusion kinetics and geom...

Stable glasses of indomethacin (IMC) were prepared by using physical vapor deposition. Wide-angle X-ray scattering measurements were performed to characterize the average local structure. IMC glasses prepared at a substrate temperature of 0.84 T(g) (where T(g) is the glass transition temperature) and a deposition rate of 0.2 nm/s show a broad, high-intensity peak at low q values that is not pre...

A portable quartz crystal micro balance for physical vapor deposition techniques is presented. The device is used for the calibration of evaporators employed in the preparation of thin film systems that are studied in surface science. The design is based upon a portable sample setup, highly versatile and customizable. It can be transported within an ultrahigh vacuum system, stored in a sample g...

The quantity of ablated mass and its composition strongly depend on the number of laser pulses and laser fluence at the sample target surface. For chemical analysis, thin-film deposition, cutting, and other laser-ablation applications, the quantity of mass removed vs. number of laser pulses is important. In addition, the composition of the vapor can be critical, for example, in providing accura...

Atomic shadowing during kinetically limited physical vapor deposition causes a chaotic instability in the layer morphology that leads to nanorod growth. Glancing angle deposition GLAD experiments indicate that the rod morphology, in turn, exhibits a chaotic instability with increasing surface diffusion. The measured rod width versus growth temperature converges onto a single curve for all metal...

This study investigated the effects of deposition techniques on the microstructural and tribological properties of Ti/TiN/TiCN/TiAlN multilayer coatings onto a Custom 450 steel substrate. The coatings were produced using cathodic arc physical vapor deposition (CAPVD) and plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition (PACVD). The microstructural of the coatings was evaluated using (SEM), and phase f...