Multilayered structures are a promising route to tailor electronic, magnetic, optical, and/or mechanical properties and durability of functional materials. Sputter deposition at room temperature, being an out-of-equilibrium process, introduces structural defects and confers to these nanosystems an intrinsic thermodynamical instability. As-deposited materials exhibit a large amount of internal atomic displacements within each constituent block as well as severe interface roughness between different layers. To access and characterize the internal multilayer disorder and its thermal evolution, X-ray diffraction investigation and analysis are performed systematically at differently grown Ag-Ge/aluminum nitride (AlN) multilayers (co-deposited, sequentially deposited with and without radio frequency (RF) bias) samples and after high-temperature annealing treatment. We report here on model calculations based on a kinematic formalism describing the displacement disorder both within the multilayer blocks and at the interfaces to reproduce the experimental X-ray diffraction intensities. Mixing and displacements at the interface are found to be considerably reduced after thermal treatment for co- and sequentially deposited Ag-Ge/AlN samples. The application of a RF bias during the deposition causes the highest interface mixing and introduces random intercalates in the AlN layers. X-ray analysis is contrasted to transmission electron microscopy pictures to validate the approach.
Keywords: Ag/AlN nano-multilayers; X-ray diffraction; disorder; microstructure.