Chasing H- in Rare-earth Metal Oxyhydride Thin Films

Rare-earth metal oxyhydride thin films show a photochromic effect, where their transparency decreases (reversibly) with exposure to light with energy greater than its optical band gap. The precise underlying mechanism behind this effect is unknown, but is investigated in this thesis by using techniques such as muon spin relaxation, or materials...

Gas-phase Deposition of Thin Aluminium Oxide Films at Ambient Conditions

Particles are widely used in the chemical industry as raw material and end product. In many applications of particles, it is advantageous to give them a coating that can either protect the particle from outside influences or give it an additional function. Technologies to provide micron-sized particles with relatively thick coatings (in the...

AlN piezoelectric films for sensing and actuation

Aluminum Nitride (AlN) is explored as a thin film material for piezoelectric MEMS applications. A pulse DC reactive sputtering technique is used to deposit the AlN thin films and process parameters are optimized to obtain good crystallinity and high c-axis orientation films. A CMOS compatible process is developed and employed to fabricate...

Characterization of Thin Film Photoanodes for Solar Water Splitting

For centuries, mankind has mostly used fossil fuels, i.e., natural gas, coal, and oil for its energy needs. With the fast rise of the world population and the rising standards of living in the developing countries, the amount of energy the world is going to need in the coming decades will grow enormously. Due to environmental concerns and the...

Atomic scale simulation of oxide and metal film growth

Improvement of wear resistant and tribological properties of materials is of great technological importance and is the main relevance of the current oxide coatings study. Aluminum oxide is especially interesting because of its very rapid self-repair capacity. As a second subject of this thesis, Cu film growth on Ta, a diffusion barrier material,...

Numerical simulations of rarefied gas flows in thin film processes

Many processes exist in which a thin film is deposited from the gas phase, e.g. Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). These processes are operated at ever decreasing reactor operating pressures and with ever decreasing wafer feature dimensions, reaching into the rarefied flow regime. As numerical simulation tools are frequently used to design and...

A mesoscopic approach to the study of thin protective coatings by Positron Beam Analysis and Scanning Electron Microscopy

The study of thin protective coatings is one of the major research topics in the industry. Among the many questions in this wide topic, the aim of this thesis has been to contribute to the understanding of two of them: the problem of the adhesion and the role of porosity in thin films. The thin films studied in this work were mainly...

High-Tc superconducting thin films devices