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Bilayer amorphous carbon films synthesized by filtered cathodic vacuum arc deposition

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Abstract

A bilayer film deposition process for synthesizing ultrathin amorphous carbon (a-C) films with structure and properties dominated by those of the sp3-rich bulk layer was developed in this study. This was accomplished by incorporating in conventional filtered cathodic vacuum arc (FCVA) deposition a low-ion-energy pre-deposition step (no substrate biasing) leading to the formation of an ultrathin (<1 nm) carbon layer and a post-deposition step of high-energy Ar+ ion sputtering resulting in film thinning. The thickness and cross-sectional structure of hydrogen-free a-C ultrathin films synthesized by this multistep FCVA process under optimum substrate bias conditions (−100 V pulsed bias voltage) were examined by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy. The bilayer a-C films synthesized under these conditions exhibit slightly higher sp3 fractions and interface and bulk layers significantly thinner and thicker, respectively, compared with single-layer a-C films of similar thickness deposited under the same FCVA conditions.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The TEM and EELS studies were carried out at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Proposal No. 1886). The work at the Molecular Foundry was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy (Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231).

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  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Jun Xie & Kyriakos Komvopoulos

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  1. Jun Xie
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  2. Kyriakos Komvopoulos
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Correspondence to Kyriakos Komvopoulos.

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Xie, J., Komvopoulos, K. Bilayer amorphous carbon films synthesized by filtered cathodic vacuum arc deposition. Journal of Materials Research 31, 3161–3167 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2016.250

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