Investigation of Interfacial Microstructures of TiN/AlN Multilayers by Neutron Reflectometry

Abstract

Three alternate TiN/AlN nanostructured multilayers with the TiN layer thicknesses of 60, 70, and 120 Å and the AlN layer thickness of 10 Å were fabricated using dc reactive magnetron sputtering. Microstructural characterizations of the three nano-scale films were performed using nonpolarized specular neutron reflectometry. The results showed that the three TiN/AlN multilayer thin films were typical superlattice films and the thicknesses of the TiN layer and AlN layer in the multilayers were consistent with the design thickness nearly. The interface roughness was asymmetric in all the samples. The interface of AlN growing on TiN was much sharper than that of TiN growing on AlN and the latter was the diffusion interface in the TiN/AlN multilayer films.