Surface roughness of Ni/Ti multilayers made by magnetron sputtering

Nickel/titanium multilayers with different period of 10, 30, 50 and 75 were fabricated by DC magnetron sputtering. Grazing incidence X-ray measured reflectivity was used to characterize the interfacial roughness of the multilayers. To study the evolution law of surface roughness of Ni/Ti multilayers with different period numbers, atomic force microscope(AFM) was used to characterize the surfaces of the multilayers. The results show that surface roughness of Ni/Ti multilayers increases with the number of periods of the multilayers. As the number of periods increases from 10 to 75, the roughness increases from 0.8 nm to 1.69 nm. Fitting results show that surface roughness mainly varies with the number of periods as a cubic function.