Refining interface stress measurement in nanomultilayers through layer corrugation and interface roughness corrections

Y Hu and A Sharma and A Druzhinin and C Cancellieri and V Turlo, APPLIED SURFACE SCIENCE, 703, 163190 (2025).

DOI: 10.1016/j.apsusc.2025.163190

This study introduces new models that incorporate layer corrugation and interface roughness into standard approaches for measuring interface stress in nanomultilayers (NMLs). Applied to Cu/W NMLs, these models show that ignoring such features can inflate measured interface stress by up to 0.4 J/m2. However, corrugation and roughness alone cannot account for the extreme stresses reported, suggesting that atomic-scale phenomena (e.g., intermixing and metastable phase formation at the interfaces) dominate. These findings highlight the importance of balancing bilayer counts and thickness-to-roughness ratios for reliable stress quantification, providing a practical pathway to designing and characterizing advanced nanocomposite coatings with improved accuracy.

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