Application of ion beams in the study of depth profiling of nitrogen

Abstract In recent days there has been considerable interest in the analysis of nitrogen concentration in Si 3 N 4 , GaN, TiN and TaN films. The analysis of these films using Rutherford Back Scattering Analysis (RBS) suffers from poor sensitivity to nitrogen. This work presents two resonance reactions for depth profiling of nitrogen: 14 N(p, γ) 15 O at 278 keV and 15 N(p, αγ) 12 C at 897 keV. The technique is non-destructive and can be used for both conductive and non-conductive films. Both the techniques were tried on different films and their sensitivity, accuracy and repeatability are reported in this work.