Thin Film Technology
The Thin Film Technology group is working on problems concerning the deposition of thin coatings of mainly chemical compounds like metal oxides, nitrides, oxynitrides and also metal fluorides onto various substrates. Single films and multilayers are deposited mainly on glass and afterwards optically as well as mechanically characterized carefully. The studied thin films are applied in the fields of optics, medicine and tribology.
For the reactive film deposition plasma processes or plasma supported processes like ion plating, ion beam assisted deposition, and magnetron sputtering are the preferred technologies. The plasma itself is studied with respect to the kind and amount of ions and their kinetic energy distribution.
It is tried then to correlate the obtained optical and mechanical film properties with the deposition parameters. Such results enable the development of models for the reaction sequences in the film formation, important for quality optimization.