Characterization of ceramic thin films and bulks by AFM techniques

MARIA LUZ SANTIAGO; SEBASTIAN BAROLIN; NADIA MAMANA; MARIA ALEJANDRA FERNÁNDEZ SOLARTE; RODRIGO MACHADO; AGUSTÍN FRATTINI; ARIEL DI LORETO; OSCAR DE SANCTIS; NORA PELLEGRI

ACTA MICROSCOPICA

CIASEM

Año: 2009 vol. 18 p. 287 - 288

0798-4545

In the last years, the morphologic characterization of non-conductive materials and inorganic compounds has been widely benefited with the appearance of SPM techniques. One of the reasons has been their versatility to analyze samples with no previous preparation such as metal coatings, acidic attacks, cuts, replica techniques, etc, necessaries to measure using SEM, TEM, etc. In this work we present the morphologic characterization of several ceramic samples as thin films and bulk using a NanoTec ELECTRONICA AFM equipment in different working modes: contact, taping, jumping, etc, showing the potentiality of the technique as a complement of other ones. Many different samples obtained by sol-gel and chemical solution deposition were analyzed to determine properties such as grain size distribution, porosity, sintering mechanism, phase separation process, film thickness, etc. The materials compositions samples were: Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3–PbTiO3 (PMN-PT), SrBi2Ta2O9 (SBT), (KXNa1-X)NbO3 (NKN), ZrO2, HfO2, BaZrxTi1-xO3.(BZT), etc. Other studies are shown to compare, complete and confirm results such as DRX, DTA-Tg, UV-Vis, etc.