Thin Film Synthesis of Nickel Containing Compounds

Most electrical, magnetic or optical devices are today based on several, usually extremely thin layers of different materials. In this thesis chemical synthesis processes have been developed for growth of less stable and metastable layers, and even multilayers, of nickel containing compounds. A chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method for deposition of metastable Ni3N has been developed. The deposition process employs ammonia as nitrogen precursor. An atomic layer deposition (ALD) process for deposition of both polycrystalline and epitaxial NiO and using low oxygen activity, has also been developed. Both deposition processes utilizes bis(2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-3,5-heptanedionato)nickel(II) (Ni(thd)2) as the metal precursor. The Ni3N deposition proceeds via surface reactions. The growth rate is very sensitive to the partial pressure of ammonia, why adsorbed –NHx species are believed to be of importance for the film growth. Similar reactions can be expected between the metal precursor and H2O. For ALD of NiO a large excess of water was needed For the multilayered structures of Ni3N/NiO, growth processes, working at low activities of oxygen and hydrogen, are needed to avoid oxidation or reduction of the underlying layer. Chemical vapor growth methods such as CVD and ALD are often suffering from using high activities of hydrogen or oxygen to deposit metals and oxides. An alternative deposition pathway for metal deposition, without any hydrogen in the vapor, has been demonstrated. The metal has been formed by decomposition of the metastable nitride Ni3N in a post-annealing process. Ni3N decomposes via different mechanisms, depending on environment in the annealing process. The different mechanisms result in different degrees of ordering in the resulting Ni films. From the knowledge gained about the chemical growth of NiO and Ni3N as well as the decomposition of Ni3N, well-defined multilayer structures have been produced in different combinations of NiO, Ni3N and Ni