High Energy Ion Beam Analysis of Buried alpha-Fe {approx} 2O {approx} 3(0001)/alpha-Al {approx} 2O {approx} 3(0001) Interface

Synthesis of model oxides as thin films on various oxide and metal substrates to obtain high quality surfaces is a growing interest in the scientific community. High quality surfaces are important for the investigation of physical and chemical properties of these film surfaces. In most cases the single crystal oxides purchased form the commercial vendors still exhibit large amount defects in the material. In some cases, especially in the case of iron oxides, high quality single crystals are not commercially available. In addition, high quality iron oxide films have applications in several areas including heterogeneous catalysis, magnetic thin films, surface geochemistry, corrosion and integrated microwave devices. As such, the growth of high crystalline quality iron oxide thin films is of increasing interest. Recently, several high-quality well-oriented single crystal iron oxide films with various stoichiometries have been synthesized using Molecular Beam Epitaxial (MBE) growth and the structural properties have been analyzed by various surface and bulk sensitive techniques. Most of these studies are surface related and it has been shown that high-quality well-oriented surfaces can be obtained in these films. On the other hand, the bulk related studies are mostly limited to x-ray diffraction (XRD) studies, and the crystalline quality, impuritymore » concentrations and locations, dislocations and disordering at the interfaces, elemental in and out diffusion at the interfaces are not known in some cases. Recently we have investigated the Al diffusion at the Fe2O3(0001)/Al2O3(0001) interface and Mg diffusion at the Fe2O3(001)/MgO(001) and Fe3O4(001)/MgO(001) interfaces using Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS) and channeling (RBS/C) techniques. Al diffusion into the Fe2O3(0001) film was observed after heating the sample to 970 K using RBS.« less