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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

low-stress ceramic films, stable films, plasma etching

College

Physical and Mathematical Sciences

Department

Physics and Astronomy

Abstract

My research proceeded more or less according to the plan that I proposed. What changed was that I realized there were many more details necessary to work out than what I had included in my proposal. By collaborating with professors in the physics and electrical engineering departments, I was able to find recipes that produced low-stress ceramic films, the difficulty was in finding a method to suspend these films over large areas. As expected, I was able to produce thinner, more stable films on a support than what had been previously reported for suspended films in the literature. Unfortunately, I first was depositing these films onto a rigid substrate, and then attempting to use a chemical etch to release the films. I quickly found that any sort of wet processing would destroy films of the thicknesses that I was producing. Think about putting a kite with very thin sails in water and moving it back and forth. The water pressure tends to burst the sails. For my project, once the films burst, they roll up on themselves like a piece of plastic wrap.

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