Abstract
To develop an approach to obtaining nanoscale structural information of highly textured thin films, we investigated the structures of ground Mg thin films of 200 and 400 nm thicknesses deposited on thin quartz glass substrates by the atomic pair distribution function (PDF) analysis of synchrotron X-ray total scattering data. The PDFs of both thin films showed clear peaks up to the high interatomic distance region indicating the presence of well-defined long range structural order. For the case of the Mg thin film of 200 nm thickness, it was difficult to subtract glass substrate signals completely and, as a result, large SiO2 peaks remained leading to inaccurate structural information. On the other hand, SiO2 peaks were not noticeable in the PDF of the Mg thin film of 400 nm thickness and its lattice parameters obtained by PDF refinement agreed well with the reported values of bulk Mg. Our analysis suggested that one of the most critical parts of this approach is the removal of the substrate signals completely.
