1. Optical Identification of Materials Transformations in Oxide Thin Films.
- Author
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Sutherland DR, Connolly AB, Amsler M, Chang MC, Gann KR, Gupta V, Ament S, Guevarra D, Gregoire JM, Gomes CP, Bruce van Dover R, and Thompson MO
- Subjects
- Materials Testing, Optical Phenomena, Oxides chemistry
- Abstract
Recent advances in high-throughput experimentation for combinatorial studies have accelerated the discovery and analysis of materials across a wide range of compositions and synthesis conditions. However, many of the more powerful characterization methods are limited by speed, cost, availability, and/or resolution. To make efficient use of these methods, there is value in developing approaches for identifying critical compositions and conditions to be used as a priori knowledge for follow-up characterization with high-precision techniques, such as micrometer-scale synchrotron-based X-ray diffraction (XRD). Here, we demonstrate the use of optical microscopy and reflectance spectroscopy to identify likely phase-change boundaries in thin film libraries. These methods are used to delineate possible metastable phase boundaries following lateral-gradient laser spike annealing (lg-LSA) of oxide materials. The set of boundaries are then compared with definitive determinations of structural transformations obtained using high-resolution XRD. We demonstrate that the optical methods detect more than 95% of the structural transformations in a composition-gradient La-Mn-O library and a Ga
2 O3 sample, both subject to an extensive set of lg-LSA anneals. Our results provide quantitative support for the value of optically detected transformations as a priori data to guide subsequent structural characterization, ultimately accelerating and enhancing the efficient implementation of micrometer-resolution XRD experiments.- Published
- 2020
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