Mechanical and Optical Investigations of Cr Thin Films Deposited on Si Substrate

Chromium thin films were prepared by high-power impulse magnetron sputtering and investigated by both mechanical and optical techniques to extract, characterize, and correlate their corresponding properties. Cr thin films have a wide palette of applications in optics, and their optical properties may differ from the bulk material. In this work we prepared Cr thin films with different thickness deposited on Si substrate and characterize their mechanical and optical properties with nanoscale resolution. We found that the thickness of the films has a high influence upon both mechanical and optical properties of the films, resulting different Young’s modulus, refractive index and extinction coefficient.