Anomalous epitaxial stability of (001) interfaces in ZrN/SiNx multilayers

Isostructural stability of B1-NaCl type SiN on (001) and (111) oriented ZrN surfaces is studied theoretically and experimentally. The ZrN/SiNx/ZrN superlattices with modulation wavelength of 3.76 nm (dSiNx∼0.4 nm) were grown by dc-magnetron sputtering on MgO(001) and MgO(111). The results indicate that 0.4 nm thin SiNx layers utterly influence the preferred orientation of epitaxial growth: on MgO(001) cube-on-cube epitaxy of ZrN/SiNx superlattices were realized whereas multilayers on MgO(111) surface exhibited an unexpected 002 texture with a complex fourfold 90°-rotated in-plane preferred orientation. Density functional theory calculations confirm stability of a (001) interface with respect to a (111) which explains the anomaly.