Artificially Induced Grain Alignment in Thin Films

Thin-film growth is a very old art and an established scientific field in materials science. For decades, growth of monocrystal-like films has been practiced by making use of epitaxy on monocrystalline substrates. In the quest for greater control of materials, the next level of achievement will be to grow well-oriented thin films on arbitrary substrates, i.e., without the need for monocrystalline substrates. That is the goal of artificially inducing grain alignment in thin films. Texturing methods show significant promise in fabricating technologically attractive grain-aligned films. However, over the last three decades a variety of methods for grain alignment have been demonstrated with varying degrees of success. The focus of this book is on physical vapor deposition methods for growth of inorganic thin films, with special attention paid to ion beam assisted deposition (IBAD) texturing. Topics include: milestones in IBAD texturing; IBAD texturing; IBAD long-length application and texturing by other techniques.