Nanomechanical properties of TiN/ZrN multilayers prepared by pulsed laser deposition

Abstract

The ability to control matter at the range of micron as well nanometer is crucial for material science and engineering. In the domain of material science, the transition metal (TM) nitrides find a unique place owing to their excellent properties such as wear resistance, high hardness and etc. These excellent properties recommended TM nitrides to be used as hard and protective coatings. Further improvements of the mechanical properties were reported by using either ternary compounds such as TiSiC, TiSiN, TiAlN, multilayer or bilayers structures. Here we report the preparation of of multilayer with no of layers of 2,4,10 of titanium nitride (TiN)/zirconium nitride (ZrN) thin films on single crystal Si(100) substrate by using pulsed laser deposition with Nd-YAG laser operating at a wavelength of 1064 nm, pulsed duration 6 ns and repetition rate 10 Hz. The multilayers are grown by ablating from the targets of Zr and Ti in reactive DC nitrogen plasma at a substrate temperature of 673 K at a nitrogen partial pressure of 2x10-3mbar. We investigated the mechanical properties and roughness analysis by Nanoindentation and Atomic force microscopy. Grazing incidence X ray diffraction was used to identify the phase presence in multilayers of TiN/ZrN and cross sectional scanning electron microscopy was used to examine the microstructures and thickness of bilayers. The nanoindentation results showed that peak in hardness was observed in (TiN/ZrN) 2 about 18 Gpa and young’s modulus 250 Gpa