Cation diffusion in polycrystalline thin films of monoclinic HfO2 deposited by atomic layer deposition

Though present in small amounts and migrating at low rates, intrinsic cation defects play a central role in governing the operational lifetime of oxide-ion conducting materials through slow degradation processes such as interdiffusion, kinetic demixing, grain growth, and creep. In this study, a new experimental approach to characterizing the behavior of such slow-moving, minority defects is presented. Diffusion is probed in samples with a constant cation-defect concentration well above the equilibrium values. This approach is applied to monoclinic hafnium dioxide, m-HfO2. To this end, nanocrystalline thin films of m-HfO2 were prepared by atomic layer deposition. Diffusion experiments with ZrO2 as a diffusion source were performed in the temperature range 1173 <= T/K <= 1323 in air. The Zr diffusion profiles obtained subsequently by secondary ion mass spectrometry exhibited the following two features: the first feature was attributed to slow bulk diffusion and the second was attributed to combined fast grain-boundary diffusion and slow bulk diffusion. The activation enthalpy of Zr diffusion in bulk HfO2 was found to be (2.1 +/- 0.2) eV. This result is consistent with the density-functional-theory calculations of hafnium-vacancy migration in m-HfO2, which yield values of similar to 2 eV for a specific path. The activation enthalpy of the grain-boundary diffusion of (2.1 +/- 0.3) eV is equal to that for bulk diffusion. This behavior is interpreted in terms of enhanced cation diffusion along space-charge layers.