The incidence of symmetric tilt grain boundaries in polycrystalline thin films of gold

Journal Article · Sat Jun 01 04:00:00 EDT 1996 · Scripta Materialia

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/1359-6462(96)00042-5· OSTI ID:250699

Singh, V; King, A H ^[1]

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1. State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook, NY (United States). Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering

Polycrystalline thin films have attracted increased research attention in recent times, due to their importance in semiconductor, magnetic, magneto-optic and other applications. These films are often found to exhibit a strong fiber texture with one of the low index directions, <100>, <110>, <111> perpendicular to the film plane. The grain boundaries in such polycrystalline films are usually perpendicular to the film surface implying a tilt character, i.e., the rotation axis is parallel to the grain boundary plane, and also parallel to the common film normal. According to Neumann`s principle, a symmetric boundary should represent an extremum -- either a minimum or a maximum -- of the interfacial energy with respect to changes of boundary plane, and Wolf has shown by computer simulation that symmetric tilt boundaries often correspond to energy minima. If symmetric tilt boundaries generally have lower energy than other boundaries, one might expect a larger than random proportion of all the boundaries to be of this type. In this paper, the authors report a preliminary determination of the proportion of grain boundaries (in the immediate vicinity of triple junctions) that have a symmetric tilt character in polycrystalline gold thin films, prepared by thermal evaporation and subsequent annealing.

• OSTI ID: 250699
• Journal Information: Scripta Materialia, Journal Name: Scripta Materialia Journal Issue: 11 Vol. 34; ISSN 1359-6462; ISSN XZ503X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
ANNEALING
CRYSTALLOGRAPHY
ENERGY
EVAPORATION
FIBERS
GOLD
GRAIN BOUNDARIES
INTERFACES
ORIENTATION
SURFACES
TEXTURE