Oxygen-induced amorphous structure of tungsten thin films

A combination of energy-filtered electron diffraction, electron energy-loss spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and x-ray diffraction are used to establish that oxygen impurities incorporated in tungsten films prepared by magnetron sputtering in the early stage of the deposition play a dominant role in the formation of an amorphous phase. Energy-filtered electron diffraction data collected from a range of amorphous films were Fourier transformed to a reduced density function (RDF) and matched with an amorphous model. The results show that better agreement with the experimental RDF is achieved if the amorphous model consists of a random continuous matrix of clusters with W3O-like symmetry. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0003-6951(99)02341-4].