Preparation of 24 ternary thin film materials libraries on a single substrate in one experiment for irreversible high-throughput studies.

For different areas of combinatorial materials science, it is desirable to have multiple materials libraries: especially for irreversible high-throughput studies, like, for example, corrosion resistance testing in different media or annealing of complete materials libraries at different temperatures. Therefore a new combinatorial sputter-deposition process was developed which yields 24 materials libraries in one experiment on a single substrate. It is discussed with the example of 24 Ti-Ni-Ag materials libraries. They are divided based on the composition coverage and orientation of composition gradient into two sets of 12 nearly identical materials libraries. Each materials library covers at least 30-40% of the complete ternary composition range. An acid etch test in buffered-HF solution was performed, illustrating the feasibility of our approach for destructive materials characterization. The results revealed that within the composition range of Ni < 30 at.%, the films were severely etched. The composition range which shows reversible martensitic transformations was confirmed to be outside this region. The high output of the present method makes it attractive for combinatorial studies requiring multiple materials libraries.