Journal
APL MATERIALS
Volume 1, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
AMER INST PHYSICS
DOI: 10.1063/1.4818170
Keywords
-
Funding
- VINNOVA VINN Excellence Center on Functional Nanoscale Materials (FunMat)
- Swedish Research Council
- VINNOVA Strategic Faculty Grant VINNMER - Marie Curie Chair
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences [DE-AC02-98CH10886]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Self-organization on the nanometer scale is a trend in materials research. Thermodynamic driving forces may, for example, yield chessboard patterns in metal alloys [Y. Ni and A. G. Khachaturyan, Nature Mater. 8, 410-414 (2009)] or nitrides [P. H. Mayrhofer, A. Horling, L. Karlsson, J. Sjolen, T. Larsson, and C. Mitterer, Appl. Phys. Lett. 83, 2049 (2003)] during spinodal decomposition. Here, we explore the ZrN-AlN system, which has one of the largest positive enthalpies of mixing among the transition metal aluminum nitrides [D. Holec, R. Rachbauer, L. Chen, L. Wang, D. Luefa, and P. H. Mayrhofer, Surf. Coat. Technol. 206, 1698-1704 (2011); B. Alling, A. Karimi, and I. Abrikosov, Surf. Coat. Technol. 203, 883-886 (2008)]. Surprisingly, a highly regular superhard (36 GPa) two-dimensional nanolabyrinthine structure of two intergrown single crystal phases evolves during magnetron sputter thin film synthesis of Zr0.64Al0.36N/MgO(001). The self-organization is surface driven and the synergistic result of kinetic limitations, where the enthalpy reduction balances both investments in interfacial and elastic energies. (C) 2013 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available