We introduce new models that incorporate layer corrugation and interface roughness into standard approaches for measuring interface stress in nanomultilayers (NMLs). Applied to Cu/W NMLs, these models show that ignoring such features can inflate measured interface stress by up to 0.4 J/m^2. However, corrugation and roughness alone cannot account for the extreme stresses reported, suggesting that atomic-scale phenomena (e.g., intermixing and metastable phase formation at the interfaces) dominate. These findings highlight the importance of balancing bilayer counts and thickness-to-roughness ratios for reliable stress quantification, providing a practical pathway to designing and characterizing advanced nanocomposite coatings with improved accuracy.
@article{arxiv.2501.18247,
title = {Refining interface stress measurement in nanomultilayers through layer corrugation and interface roughness corrections},
author = {Yang Hu and Aleksandr Druzhinin and Claudia Cancellieri and Vladyslav Turlo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.18247},
year = {2025}
}