Deposition and Characterization of C-NbN/NbCN Multilayers on Si(100) Substrates

Abstract

The cubic-NbN/NbCN multilayers with modulation periodicity (Λ) ranging from 4.2 to 39.1 nm were deposited on Si (100) substrate by reactive magnetron sputtering in a mixture of Ar and N2 gases. The Λ dependent structural, mechanical and tribological properties for resulting c-NbN/NbCN multilayers were explored. As Λ varied from 4.2 to 39.1 nm, all the films exhibited an obvious modulated structure. Increasing the Λ, the Nb (C,N)(111) peak in XRD gradually shifted to bigger angles and the peak intensity of NbN(111) became stronger. The stress for all multilayers was compressive ranging in between the stress for both NbN and NbCN single layers, and the stress value was stable with increasing Λ. The NbN layer was beneficial to relaxing the compressive stress which induced by NbCN layer. In addition, as Λ increases, the hardness (H) first increased, and then decreased after reaching a maximum value. The obvious enhancement in hardness for multilayers was observed, whose maximum value approaches 43.3 GPa when Λ = 8.4 nm, 37% larger than that obtained by the rule of mixture value. The friction coefficient values of NbN/NbCNmultilayers ranging between 0.34 and 0.4 were much lower than that of NbN monolayer but higher than that of NbCN monolayer were.