Study of the on-surface diffusion of the ternary system Au/Pd/Si (111)

The ternary system has been built by the deposit of two metal coats (layers), Gold and Palladium on a monocrystalline Silicon substrate of orientation (111). The whole system has been subjected to a vacuum heat treatment, the range of temperatures starts from 100 degrees C up to 600 degrees C by steps of 50 degrees C and with an annealing time being fixed at 30 min. Both metal layers were successively deposited without breaking the vacuum within the evaporator. The Silicon substrate had undergone beforehand a chemical treatment by the method in the CP4 to prevent it from the Oxygen barrier effect. So, we obtained few series of samples of which the characterization has been carried out by various techniques, namely: the spectroscopy of retrodiffusion of Rutherford (RBS), the diffraction of the X-rays (XRD), the scanning electronic microscopy (SEM) and its incorporated technique of Energy Dispersive X-rays (DEX). These analyses allowed us to fulfil a study of the interdiffusion between the various elements and to follow the thermodynamics transformations that have arisen.