Pulsed laser deposition of nanocrystalline lanthanum phosphate films

Thin film coating of nanocrystalline Lanthanum phosphate has been successfully achieved using the Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) technique. Although, coatings generated by PLD on polished stainless steel (SS) substrates, as well as, on optically polished quartz samples were found to be of good quality, they were found to have poor bonding with the substrate surface. Therefore, PLD based coating was tried on SS substrates having a pre-coating of NiCrAlY. Our results demonstrate that using PLD technique good quality coating of Lanthanum phosphate can be obtained on SS substrates with prior surface preparation, either using a pre-coat layer or else, by sand blasting the substrate surface. Detailed investigation of the PLD generated coating under scanning electron microscope has shown good homogeneity along with minimum porosity in the laser deposited layers. (author)