Advanced surface characterization of silver nanocluster segregation in Ag-TiCN bioactive coatings by RBS, GDOES, and ARXPS

Surface modification by means of wear protective and antibacterial coatings represents, nowadays, a crucial challenge in the biomaterials field in order to enhance the lifetime of bio-devices. It is possible to tailor the properties of the material by using an appropriate combination of high wear resistance (e.g., nitride or carbide coatings) and biocide agents (e.g., noble metals as silver) to fulfill its final application. This behavior is controlled at last by the outmost surface of the coating. Therefore, the analytical characterization of these new materials requires high-resolution analytical techniques able to provide information about surface and depth composition down to the nanometric level. Among these techniques are Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS), glow discharge optical emission spectroscopy (GDOES), and angle resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (ARXPS). In this work, we present a comparative RBS-GDOES-ARXPS study of the surface characterization of Ag-TiCN coatings with Ag/Ti atomic ratios varying from 0 to 1.49, deposited at room temperature and 200 °C. RBS analysis allowed a precise quantification of the silver content along the coating with a non-uniform Ag depth distribution for the samples with higher Ag content. GDOES surface profiling revealed that the samples with higher Ag content as well as the samples deposited at 200 °C showed an ultrathin (1-10 nm) Ag-rich layer on the coating surface followed by a silver depletion zone (20-30 nm), being the thickness of both layers enhanced with Ag content and deposition temperature. ARXPS analysis confirmed these observations after applying general algorithm involving regularization in addition to singular value decomposition techniques to obtain the concentration depth profiles. Finally, ARXPS measurements were used to provide further information on the surface morphology of the samples obtaining an excellent agreement with SEM observations when a growth model of silver islands with a height d = 1.5 nm and coverage θ = 0.20 was applied to the sample with Ag/Ti = 1.49 and deposited at room temperature.