Contact which only involves a small volume of material is becoming increasingly important to many industries including micromachines, microelectronics, and magnetic recording. The ability to characterize surface roughening on the micro- and nanoscopic scale is invaluable in understanding microplasticity due to indentation, scratches, wear, fatigue and epitactic mismatch. It has been demonstrated that AFM studies are appropriate for developing a mechanistic approach to μN load indentation analysis since they allow deformation volumes and residual depths to be measured and characterized directly and unambiguously.In the present study, interfaces between silicate glass and single-crystal α-Al2O3 have been studied using AFM and nanoindentation. The interfaces between the glass and the crystalline grains were prepared by growing films of anorthite (CaAl2Si2O8) composition with thickness ranging 100-200 nm on single-crystal sapphire substrates of {1120} (A-plane) and {1102} (R-plane) crystallographic orientations by pulsed-laser deposition (PLD). Some specimens were subjected to heat treatments in a conventional box furnace causing films to dewet the substrates. Fig. 1 shows schematically the morphology of the dewetted film which has resulted in the formation of distinctive islands, 0.5-2 μm in size. Both types of specimens were tested with two different micro/nanomechanical testers.
Development of In-situ Observation Methods of Surface Roughening Behavior By Hand-size Stretching Test for Metal Foils