Interfacial chemistry and electronic structure of epitaxial lattice-matched TiN/Al0.72Sc0.28N metal/semiconductor superlattices determined with soft x-ray scattering

Epitaxial lattice-matched TiN/(Al,Sc)N metal/semiconductor superlattices have attracted significant interest in recent years for their potential applications in thermionic emission-based thermoelectric devices, optical hyperbolic metamaterials, and hot-electron-based solar-energy converters, as well as for the fundamental studies on the electron, photon, and phonon propagation in heterostructure materials. In order to achieve high efficiency devices and for the quest to discover new physics and device functionalities, it is extremely important that the superlattices exhibit atomically sharp and abrupt interfaces with minimal interface mixing and surface roughness. Moreover, as the energy transport across the cross-plane direction of these superlattices depends on the interface-properties, it is important to characterize the interfacial electronic structure and the chemistry of bond formation. Employing a combination of soft x-ray scattering techniques such as x-ray diffraction and synchrotron-based x-ray reflectivity, in this article, we demonstrate sharp and abrupt TiN/(Al,Sc)N superlattice interfaces with an asymmetric interface roughness ranging from two-to-three unit cells. Synchrotron-based soft x-ray absorption analysis revealed similar peak positions, line shapes, and absorption edges of different atoms in the individual thin films and in the superlattices, which demonstrate that the oxidation state of the atoms remains unchanged and rules-out the secondary structure or phase formation at the interfaces. The x-ray scattering results were further verified by aberration-corrected high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy imaging and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy mapping analysis. These results will be important for understanding of the transport properties of metal/semiconductor superlattices and for designing superlattice-based energy conversion devices.