Studies of nanostructured copper/hydrogenated amorphous carbon multilayer films

Nanostructured copper/hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) multilayer grown in a low base vacuum (1 × 10−3 Torr) system combining plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition and sputtering techniques. These nanostructured multilayer were found to exhibit improved electrical, optical, surface and structural properties, compared to that of monolayer a-C:H films. The residual stresses of such multilayer structure were found well below 1 GPa. Scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy results revealed a nanostructured surface morphology and low surface roughnesses values. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, secondary ion mass spectroscopy and energy dispersive X-ray analysis confirmed a very small amount of copper in these films. These structures exhibited very high optical transparency in the near infrared region (∼90%) and the optical band gap varied from 1.35 to 1.7 eV. It was noticed that the temperature dependent conductivity improved due to the presence of both copper and the nano-structured morphology.

Research highlights▶ Multilayer coatings have been grown by RF–PECVD and RF-sputtering techniques under varied bilayers from one to four. ▶ After deposition these coatings were characterized for stress, hardness, elastic modulus, SEM, AFM, XPS, EDAX, SIMS, PL, transmission, and conductivity. ▶ Observed results were correlated fairly with each other.