I need to know if both powdered XRD and Thin film XRD are applicable for thin film. Will I get the correct expected peaks if I use powdered XRD on thin films. Kindly share your valuable
Yes you can, this is very common in thin film semiconductors. My only advice is that depending on the sample height the peaks can shift slightly.
In my group we have a glass slide holder for our thin films to ensure that the height of the incident x-rays are at the same general place.
To follow up - what is the difference between thin film and PXRD? Are you talking about the available range of 2theta? Or is this grazing incidence XRD and PXRD?
You can use some X-ray powder diffraction machines for thin film measurement. Depending on your thin film thickness, you may have to go to a very low (fixed) angle of incidence (e.g. 2 degrees). If your film thickness is more than, say, 10 microns, you may want to try the conventional theta/2theta scan first, without doing the grazing incidence XRD (GIXRD).
With regards to your second question, I think I understand what you were asking. If your thin film has preferred orientation (e.g. (001) orientation), you won't see all those peaks which you would normally pick up from powder XRD analysis. However, if your thin film material A is poly-crystalline, you may collect all the diffraction peaks which look similar to the XRD data for powdered material A.
Dear colleague Michael Raj
Have a nice time and good day.
When you make XRD powder material you may need to compress it as a tablet so if your film is thicker enough, you can use.
Of course the results of powder material are different from thin films.
Ex. if the powder material is poly crystalline, thin film may be amorphous.
So the obtained peaks of powder and thin film of the same material may be different. Also you can check the validity of your assumption by doing a literature survey about your material.
I wish this is useful and help you.
Yours
A. El-Denglawey
Dear Friends,
Thank you for the valuable information. My thin films are 100 nm thin, on Silicon substrates. I am hoping that the film is a single crystal and I want to prove this using XRD. I think I should go for grazing incidence XRD. But, I want to know if I can extract the data from PXRD. I want to take the difference of two graphs, the PXRD of my sample and the PXRD of the Silicon substrate alone. Will that give me accurate results. Kindly explain.
Now with that knowledge, why should the same XRD method not work for both scenerios? The challenge is acquiring the XRD data in 2D. You are probably still utilising the archaic and ubiquitous "point counter" still on your diffractometer that the Braggs employed over a century ago. Use dental film in front of your detector at or near the Bragg condition to instantaneously determine "poly" or "mono". Know what "bracketing" is? A terminology in photography, use it. But you really need a real time 2D detector for this purpose.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_do_I_figure_out_the_spatial_thickness_of_the_individual_layers_from_these_not_so_well_resolved_diffractograms
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