Rapid Thermal Annealing of HWCVD a-Si:H Films: The Effect of the Film Hydrogen Content on the Crystallization Kinetics, Surface Morphology, and Grain Growth

We report the effect of the hydrogen (H) content (CH) on the crystallization kinetics, surface morphology and grain growth for Hot Wire CVD a-Si:H films containing 12.5 and 2.7 at.% H which are crystallized by rapid thermal anneal (RTA). For the high CH film we observe explosive H evolution, with a resultant destruction of the film for RTA temperatures >750 deg C. At RTA temperatures ~600 deg C, both films remain intact with similar morphologies. At this same lower RTA, the incubation and crystallization times decrease, and the grain size as measured by X-Ray Diffraction increases with decreasing film CH. SIMS measurements indicate that a similar film CH (<0.5 at.%) exists in both films when crystallization commences. The benefits of a two-step annealing process for the high CH film are documented

Low-Temperature Sintering of Alumina with Liquid-Forming Additives

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66046/1/j.1151-2916.1991.tb07825.x.pd

Combinatorial Exploration of Novel Transparent Conducting Oxide Materials

High-throughput combinatorial approaches have been used for the discovery and optimization of transparent conducting oxide (TCO) materials for PV applications. We report on current investigations in In-Zn-O, In-Ti-O and In-Mo-O systems. The InZnO system is shown to be amorphous in the best conducting range with a conductivity of ~ 3000 &#937;-cm-1 for 50%-70% In/Zn. The amorphous InZnO films are very smooth (2..ANG.. rms). In-Ti-O is found to be an excellent high-mobility TCO with mobilities of greater than 80 cm2/v-sec and conductivities of more than 6000 &#937;-cm-1 for sputtered thin film materials

Ferroelastic Toughening in Bismuth Vanadate

Bismuth vanadate has been used as a model system to examine toughening by stress-induced domain motion in a ferroelastic material. Fracture toughnesses in the ferroelastic and paraelastic states have been compared. Toughening and R-curve behavior have been observed in the ferroelastic state. Single crystals of BiVO_4 show domain nucleation and propagation under compressive loading and domain generation during fracture. The increase in toughening in the ferroelastic state can be explained by a combination of crack deflection and domain wall motion, the latter contributing to R-curve behavior

Characterization of microstructure and crack propagation in alumina using orientation imaging microscopy (OIM). December 1996

A more complete description requires the lattice orientations of a statistically significant number of grains, coupled with morphology such as grain size and shape; this can be obtained using orientation imaging microscopy (OIM), which uses crystallographic orientation data from Backscattered Electron Kikuchi patterns (BEKP) collected using a SEM. This report describes the OIM results for alumina; these include image quality maps, grain boundary maps, pole figures, and lattice misorientations depicted on MacKenzie plot and in Rodrigues space. High quality BEKP were obtained and the images and data readily reveal the grain morphology, texture, and grain boundary misorientations, including those for cracked boundaries. A larger number of grains should be measured to make statistical comparisons between materials with different processing histories