Electron radiation-induced material diffusion and nanocrystallization in nanostructured amorphous CoFeB thin film

Abstract Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is widely used for physical characterization of CoFeB based magnetic tunneling junctions (MTJ) with its atomic-scale resolution. However, highly energetic electron radiation during TEM analysis may cause phase and microstructure modification of CoFeB and its associated MTJ layers. It is the intention of this work to address the issues of the electron-beam sensitivity of CoFeB material. With in-situ TEM, we investigated the electron beam radiation-induced material diffusion and the nanocrystallization behaviors in nanostructured amorphous CowFexByOz/Co60Fe20B20/SiO2 thin films. It was found that electron radiation with different electron dose led to massive diffusion of Co, Fe, B and O atoms across the whole thin film layers, which directly resulted in the modification of the phase and composition of the thin film layers, i.e. the oxidation of Co, Fe, B with O diffusion and the formation of pure Si phase from SiO2. Two stages of material diffusion were observed. While Stage-I material diffusion proceeded with a high diffusion speed, Stage-II had a relatively low diffusion rate accompanying with the nanocrystallization at the bottom of the CoFeB layer. A detailed kinetic study by in-situ TEM revealed the electron-beam radiation induced massive diffusion was a non-thermal process, and the underlying driving force arose from radiation-enhanced diffusion (RED) effects. Nanocrystallization during Stage-II electron-radiation experiment showed unique phase transformation phenomena, repeated nanocrystallization, amorphization, and nanocrystallization processes in the sequence before a stable grain growth could be achieved. A detailed TEM analysis revealed that RED-enhanced B diffusion was responsible for such unique repeated phase transformation processes. B diffusion and the associated structure distortion and the local short-range re-ordering may also account for the phase transformation from fcc-CoxFe23-xB6 to B-rich orthorhombic- CoxFe3-xB phase.