Thin Film and Interface Characterization¶
MATSCI 323, Stanford University
Colin Ophus Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Nearly every technology we build depends on thin films and the interfaces between them. Semiconductor devices, batteries, solar cells, displays, hard coatings, and quantum devices all succeed or fail based on the composition, structure, and morphology of layers that may be only a few atoms thick. This course is an in-depth study of the analytical techniques we use to measure these materials.
What this course covers¶
We focus on the practical side of materials characterization: which technique answers which question, how measurements are performed, and how to interpret real data. For each technique we develop the underlying physics of the probe and its interaction with the sample, because that physics determines what a technique can and cannot measure. We treat the essential instrumentation along the way, including vacuum technology, sources, analyzers, and detectors.
The course is organized into seven modules, ordered roughly by how a real thin film gets characterized in practice: we begin with techniques that work in air on whole wafers, and end with techniques that demand ultrahigh vacuum, extensive sample preparation, or both.
Surfaces and vacuum. Why surfaces behave differently from bulk materials, and why so much of surface analysis happens in ultrahigh vacuum.
X-ray and optical metrology. Diffraction, reflectivity, ellipsometry, and optical spectroscopies: the workhorse measurements of thin film science.
Ion beams and mass spectrometry. Ion scattering, Rutherford backscattering, secondary ion mass spectrometry, and atom probe tomography.
Electron spectroscopies. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Auger electron spectroscopy, the standard probes of surface chemistry.
SEM, EBSD, and FIB. Scanning electron microscopy, orientation mapping, and focused ion beam sample preparation.
Electron diffraction and STEM. Surface diffraction, transmission electron microscopy of film cross-sections, and analytical STEM.
Scanning probe microscopy. Atomic force microscopy as quantitative metrology, functional imaging modes, and scanning tunneling microscopy.
The course closes with a synthesis lecture on choosing between techniques, and the appendices collect reference material on topics adjacent to the main sequence.
How to use this site¶
This site is the course textbook. Each module page is written to be read before the corresponding lectures, and each technique page follows a common structure: the physics of the measurement, the instrumentation, the interpretation of real data, and a summary of the technique’s strengths and limits. Homework assignments and other course logistics are distributed through Canvas.
See the course outline for the module structure, grading, and the final project, and the references page for the textbooks this course draws on.
Acknowledgments¶
This course is adapted from MATSCI 323, Thin Film and Interface Microanalysis, developed and taught at Stanford for over two decades by Professor Mark Brongersma. The course structure and much of the treatment of ion beam analysis and electron spectroscopy build on his original course notes, and his framing of surface analysis as a puzzle to be solved with the right combination of tools is used throughout this site.
This site is built with MyST Markdown and deployed from GitHub. The interactive figures and much of the site tooling were developed with the help of Claude Code from Anthropic.