Electron-diffraction studies of amorphous carbon thin films

Abstract

The sp2 rich amorphous carbons have a wide variety of microstructures ranging from flat sheetlike structures such as glassy carbon to highly curved materials having similar local ordering to the fullerenes. These differences are most apparent in the region of the graphite (0002) reflection of the energy filtered diffracted intensity obtained from these materials (Fig. 1). All these materials consist mainly of threefold coordinated atoms. This accounts for their similar appearance above 0.8 Å-1. The fullerene curves (b,c) show a string of peaks at distance scales corresponding to the packing of the large spherical and oblate molecules. The beam damaged C60 (c) shows an evolution to the sp2 amorphous carbons as the spherical structure is destroyed although the (220) reflection in fee fcc at 0.2 Å-1 does not disappear completely. This 0.2 Å-1 peak is present in the 1960 data of Kakinoki et. al. who grew films in a carbon arc under conditions similar to those needed to form fullerene rich soots.