TY  - JOUR
AU  - Mueller, Michael P.
AU  - Pingen, Katrin
AU  - Hardtdegen, Alexander
AU  - Aussen, Stephan
AU  - Kindsmueller, Andreas
AU  - Hoffmann-Eifert, Susanne
AU  - De Souza, Roger A.
TI  - Cation diffusion in polycrystalline thin films of monoclinic HfO 2 deposited by atomic layer deposition
JO  - APL materials
VL  - 8
IS  - 8
SN  - 2166-532X
CY  - Melville, NY
PB  - AIP Publ.
M1  - FZJ-2020-03003
SP  - 081104 -
PY  - 2020
AB  - Though present in small amounts and migrating at low rates, intrinsic cation defects play a central role in governing the operational lifetime of oxide-ion conducting materials through slow degradation processes such as interdiffusion, kinetic demixing, grain growth, and creep. In this study, a new experimental approach to characterizing the behavior of such slow-moving, minority defects is presented. Diffusion is probed in samples with a constant cation-defect concentration well above the equilibrium values. This approach is applied to monoclinic hafnium dioxide, m-HfO2. To this end, nanocrystalline thin films of m-HfO2 were prepared by atomic layer deposition. Diffusion experiments with ZrO2 as a diffusion source were performed in the temperature range 1173 ≤ T/K ≤ 1323 in air. The Zr diffusion profiles obtained subsequently by secondary ion mass spectrometry exhibited the following two features: the first feature was attributed to slow bulk diffusion and the second was attributed to combined fast grain-boundary diffusion and slow bulk diffusion. The activation enthalpy of Zr diffusion in bulk HfO2 was found to be (2.1 ± 0.2) eV. This result is consistent with the density-functional-theory calculations of hafnium-vacancy migration in m-HfO2, which yield values of ∼2 eV for a specific path. The activation enthalpy of the grain-boundary diffusion of (2.1 ± 0.3) eV is equal to that for bulk diffusion. This behavior is interpreted in terms of enhanced cation diffusion along space-charge layers
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000560032100002
DO  - DOI:10.1063/5.0013965
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/878685
ER  -