Abstract
Using a first-principles approach, we investigated the effect of oxygen as a substitutional impurity on cohesion of three transition metal nitride multilayers. Namely, we studied AlN/VN, AlN/TiN, and VN/TiN systems in a rock salt structure (B1) with (001) interfaces. The preferred oxygen positions were determined with the help of calculations of free energy that also included contribution from the vibrational entropy. Subsequent calculations of the cleavage energy for all possible cleavage planes enabled us to identify the weakest link and assess the impact of the oxygen impurity on a cohesion of each of the studied multilayers. Supercells of different sizes were used to estimate the effect of oxygen concentration. Our results indicate that oxygen prefers to replace nitrogen atoms in interfacial planes and that these impurities do not reduce the multilayer cohesion. Moreover, in the case of the AlN/TiN system, their presence was found to increase cohesion of the interface.
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