No Arabic abstract
Brownian thermal noise is a limiting factor for the sensitivity of many high precision metrology applications, among other gravitational-wave detectors. The origin of Brownian noise can be traced down to internal friction in the amorphous materials that are used for the high reflection coatings. To properly characterize the internal friction in an amorphous material, one needs to consider separately the bulk and shear losses. In most of previous works the two loss angles were considered equal, although without any first principle motivation. In this work we present a method that can be used to extract the material bulk and shear loss angles, based on current state-of-the-art coating ring-down measurement systems. We also show that for titania-doped tantala, a material commonly used in gravitational-wave detector coatings, the experimental data strongly favor a model with two different and distinct loss angles, over the simpler case of one single loss angle.
In this work, we studied amorphous carbon ($a$-C) thin films deposited using direct current (dc) and high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) techniques. The microstructure and electronic properties reveal subtle differences in $a$-C thin films deposited by two techniques. While, films deposited with dcMS have a smooth texture typically found in $a$-C thin films, those deposited with HiPIMS consist of dense hillocks surrounded by a porous microstructure. The density of $a$-C thin films is a decisive parameter to judge their quality. Often, x-ray reflectivity (XRR) has been used to measure the density of carbon thin films. From the present work, we find that determination of density of carbon thin films, specially those with a thickness of few tens of nm, may not be accurate with XRR due to a poor scattering contrast between the film and substrate. By utilizing neutron reflectivity (NR) in the time of flight mode, a technique not commonly used for carbon thin films, we could accurately measure differences in the densities of $a$-C thin films deposited using dcMS and HiPIMS.
Wide-bandgap perovskite stannates are of interest for the emergent all-oxide transparent electronic devices due to their unparalleled room temperature electron mobility. Considering the advantage of amorphous material in integrating with non-semiconductor platforms, we herein reported the optical and electronic properties in the prototypical stannate, amorphous barium stannate (BaSnO3) thin films, which were deposited at room temperature and annealed at various temperatures. Despite remaining amorphous status, with increasing the annealing temperature, the defect level within amorphous BaSnO3 thin films could be suppressed.
Energy spectra of backscattered and transmitted ions with primary energies of 50 keV and 100 keV interacting with self-supporting foils were recorded with a Time-of-Flight Medium-Energy Ion Scattering setup in a single experiment. Self-supporting Au and W foils without backing material were used. For He ions transmitted through Au the spectrum of detected particles shows two distinct components corresponding to different energy losses in the film, whereas for protons no such phenomenon was observed. To determine the origin of these different contributions, measurements for different angles of incidence and scattering angles have been evaluated. The results suggest that the two components in the spectrum of transmitted He ions could be attributed to impact parameter dependent energy loss, being more prominent for He ions than for protons. The main origin of the necessary impact parameter selection along the different ion trajectories is expected to be texture in the Au-foils.
We investigate the roughening of shear cracks running along the interface between a thin film and a rigid substrate. We demonstrate that short-range correlated fluctuations of the interface strength lead to self-affine roughening of the crack front as the driving force (the applied shear stress/stress intensity factor) increases towards a critical value. We investigate the disorder-induced perturbations of the crack displacement field and crack energy, and use the results to determine the crack pinning force and to assess the shape of the critical crack. The analytical arguments are validated by comparison with simulations of interface cracking.
Describing the origin of uniaxial magnetic anisotropy (UMA) is generally problematic in systems other than single crystals. We demonstrate an in-plane UMA in amorphous CoFeB films on GaAs(001) which has the expected symmetry of the interface anisotropy in ferromagnetic films on GaAs(001), but strength which is independent of, rather than in inverse proportion to, the film thickness. We show that this volume UMA is consistent with a bond-orientational anisotropy, which propagates the interface-induced UMA through the thickness of the amorphous film. It is explained how, in general, this mechanism may describe the origin of in-plane UMAs in amorphous ferromagnetic films.