Soft x-ray reflectometry, hard x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy investigations of the internal structure of TiO2(Ti)/SiO2/Si stacks

Elena O Filatova; Igor V Kozhevnikov; Andrey A Sokolov; Evgeniy V Ubyivovk; Sergey Yulin; Mihaela Gorgoi; Franz Schäfers

doi:10.1088/1468-6996/13/1/015001

Soft x-ray reflectometry, hard x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy investigations of the internal structure of TiO₂(Ti)/SiO₂/Si stacks

Sci Technol Adv Mater. 2012 Feb 2;13(1):015001. doi: 10.1088/1468-6996/13/1/015001. eCollection 2012 Feb.

Authors

Elena O Filatova¹, Igor V Kozhevnikov², Andrey A Sokolov¹, Evgeniy V Ubyivovk¹, Sergey Yulin³, Mihaela Gorgoi⁴, Franz Schäfers⁴

Affiliations

¹ St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, 198504, Russia.
² Institute of Crystallography, Moscow, 119333, Russia.
³ Fraunhofer Institut Angewandte Optik und Feinmechanik, Albert Einstein Str. 7, 07745 Jena, Germany.
⁴ Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie, (HZB-BESSY II), Albert-Einstein-Strasse 15, 12489, Berlin, Germany.

Abstract

We developed a mathematical analysis method of reflectometry data and used it to characterize the internal structure of TiO₂/SiO₂/Si and Ti/SiO₂/Si stacks. Atomic concentration profiles of all the chemical elements composing the samples were reconstructed from the analysis of the reflectivity curves measured versus the incidence angle at different soft x-ray reflection (SXR) photon energies. The results were confirmed by the conventional techniques of hard x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HXPES) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). The depth variation of the chemical composition, thicknesses and densities of individual layers extracted from SXR and HXPES measurements are in close agreement and correlate well with the HRTEM images.

Keywords: HRTEM; HXPES; Interface; Metallic titanium; Soft x-ray reflectometry (SXR); Thin films; Titanium dioxide.