Local structures analysis of carbon nitride films by utilizing NEXAFS spectroscopy

Shimoyama, Iwao   

Since the prediction of the possibility that carbon nitride would have super hard property which exceeds that of diamond, considerable efforts to synthesize this material have been employed. However, local structures in carbon nitride films synthesized have not been revealed enough. We study the local structures utilizing synchrotron radiation and revealed the existence of three kinds of local structures in carbon nitride films, i.e., cyanic structure which has C≡N triple bond, pyridine-like structure which has C=N double bond, and graphite-like structure in which carbon atom is substituted by nitrogen atom in graphite network. In this article, I explain the method of near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) that we used for this study, and from the comparison with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), I comment the availability of NEXAFS to study the local structures in new materials.