Interdiffusion processes at irradiated Cr/Si interfaces

Highlights: • Interdiffusion at Cr/Si interfaces induced by ion beam mixing at room temperature. • Creation of Cr/Si alloy metastable phases. • Reconstruction of Cr/Si interdiffusion profile by X-ray reflectometry. • Quantitative correlation between Cr and Si profiles extracted from XRR and measured by EDX–TEM. - Abstract: Chromium silicon CrSi alloys are foreseen as possible materials for spintronic devices. Ion beam mixing could be an efficient technique to produce thin films of such alloys at room temperature while avoiding thermal diffusion. In order to assess this point, we have irradiated 20 nm Cr layer on a (1 0 0) Si wafer with 70 keV Kr ions. The X-ray reflectometry technique combined with Transmission Electron Microscopy and Energy Dispersive X-ray analysis was applied to analyze, at the nanometric scale, the formation of Cr/Si blurred interfaces induced by ion beam mixing. From the analysis of reflectivity curves, it appears that nanometric Cr₅Si₃ and CrSi₂ phases are produced at the early stage of the process. The existence of these two paramagnetic phases gives some clues to explain the reason why the experimentally observed ferrimagnetism was weaker than predicted