A new model for grain boundary diffusion and nucleation in thin film reactions

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (8) ◽  
pp. 2905-2911 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.R. Coffey ◽  
K. Barmak
2021 ◽  
Vol 96 (5) ◽  
pp. 055706
Author(s):  
Songyou Lian ◽  
Congkang Xu ◽  
Jiangyong Wang ◽  
Hendrik C Swart ◽  
Jacobus J Terblans

1983 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. C. Zingu ◽  
J. W. Mayer

ABSTRACTInterdiffusion in the Si<100>/Pd2Si/Ni and Si<111>/Pd2Si/Ni thin film systems has been investigated using Rutherford backscattering spectrometry. Nickel is found to diffuse along the grain boundaries of polycrystalline Pd2Si upon which it accumulates at the Si<100>Pd2Si interface. The high mobility of Ni compared to that of si suggests that Pd diffuses faster than Si along the Pd2Si grain boundaries. An activation energy of 1.2 eV is determined for Ni grain boundary diffusion in Pd2Si.


1994 ◽  
Vol 343 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. R. Coffey ◽  
K. Barmak

ABSTRACTAn alternative model is proposed to extend the conventional view of diffusion under a concentration gradient in a grain boundary phase of width δ. The conventional model is well developed and readily applied to the thickening kinetics of polycrystalline product phases in binary diffusion couples, however it is not readily extended to other phenomena of interest in thin films, i.e., the nucleation and growth of the product phase crystallites prior to formation of a product phase layer. In the alternative model presented here, non-equilibrium thermodynamics is used to define the chemical potentials, μi, for each atomic specie in the grain and interphase boundaries of a polycrystalline diffusion couple. The chemical potential difference for each specie between the bulk phases of the diffusion couple is partitioned between the driving force for grain boundary diffusion and that for interfacial reaction. This partition leads to a characteristic decay length that describes the spatial variation of μi. Numerical calculations of μi are used to show that boundary diffusion favors heterogeneous nucleation. Product nucleation in thin film reactions is seen to be similar to precipitation from a bulk solid solution.


2011 ◽  
Vol 312-315 ◽  
pp. 1208-1215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dezső L. Beke ◽  
A. Lakatos ◽  
G. Erdélyi ◽  
A. Makovecz ◽  
G.A. Langer ◽  
...  

It was shown more recently in our Laboratory [1,2,3] that having a substrate/diffusant/thin-film/cap-layer structure (the thin film was typically several 10 nm thick, with the same order of magnitude of grain size; the refractory metal cap layer was used just to avoid the oxidation), first the diffusant atoms migrated very fast across the thin film and segregated at the film/cap-layer interface. The accumulated atoms at the film/cap layer interface form a secondary diffusion reservoir and atoms diffuse back to the layer. Later on, the thin film was gradually filled up with the diffusing atoms and composition depth profiles, determined by Secondary Neutral Mass Spectroscopy (SNMS), showed a maximum at the cap layer-thin film interface. The accumulated atoms at this interface formed a secondary diffusion reservoir and atoms diffused back to the layer. These observations can be interpreted supposing a bimodal grain boundary structure with different (fast and low) diffusivities. The observed grain boundary diffusion phenomena can be classified as C-type diffusion. The appearance of the peak observed at the cap layer interface can be used as a tool to determine the grain boundary diffusivity along the fast boundaries. Because the fast boundaries were saturated in the first stage of the process, this back-diffusion took place along the low-diffusivity boundaries only. Thus the SNMS depth-profiling is a good method to determine grain boundary diffusivities in a bimodal structure. In addition, from the overall impurity content inside the film the segregation can also be estimated, if the bulk solubility is low and the GB density is known. Numerical simulations of C-type GB diffusion in thin films with a bimodal structure confirmed that the interpretation of the result depicted above is reasonable [4]. In order to estimate roughly the GB diffusion data we determined the fast diffusivity using the first appearance method. The lower diffusivity was determined from the time evolution of the broadening of the diffusant/thin film interface. In addition both (slow and fast) diffusivities were also estimated from fitting numerical solutions obtained in [4] too.


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