Elastic constants of titanium carbide films using surface Brillouin scattering

Abstract

Surface Brillouin scattering (SBS) from surface phonons has been used for determining the dispersion curves of guided acoustic modes propagating along titanium carbide (TiC) films. Dispersion curves have been obtained by varying both the layer thickness and the angle of incidence. Elastic stiffnesses for the TiC on silicon and TiC on silicon carbide systems were determined from a least-squares fitting procedure of the velocity dispersion curves and used to simulate the respective SBS spectra. For each system there is good agreement between measured and calculated SBS spectra.