Depth profiling of titanium nitride thin films deposited on stainless steel utilizing combined EBS and NRA techniques

Composition and depth profiling of titanium nitride thin films deposited on stainless steel using vacuum arc discharge device have been determined. A combination of two ion beam analysis techniques has been applied to allow accurate quantification of nitrogen in the prepared titanium nitride thin films. These include elastic backscattering (EBS) spectrometry together with nuclear reaction analysis (NRA) technique utilizing 14N(α,p0)17O nuclear reaction, both performed at resonance energy for incident alpha beam of 4500 keV. They were applied simultaneously, using two independent charged particle detectors, one is dedicated for combined EBS/NRA measurements and the other for pure NRA one. Experimental conditions have been carefully optimized to avoid overlapping of peaks of the two spectra correspond to each reaction. Novel Multi-SIMNRA software has been utilized to enable simultaneous elemental depth profile determination of both data sets. Experimental setup of the in-vacuum system has been carefully characterized. Independent complement measurements utilizing scanning electron microscopy (SEM) equipped with energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX) were also applied to verify the experimental findings obtained by combined EBS and NRA techniques. The results have revealed N/Ti ratio of around 1 for the prepared films, with low levels of contamination elements. Finally, X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements have demonstrated TiN structure with low oxygen contamination.