Determination of elastic constants of a fiber-textured gold film by combining synchrotron x-ray diffraction and in situ tensile testing

The elastic behavior of gold thin films deposited onto Kapton substrate has been studied using in situ tensile tester in a four-circle goniometer on a synchrotron beam line (LURE facility, France). The mechanical description of the substrate-thin film composite structure has been developed to determine the stress tensor in the film while the strong {111} fiber texture was taken into account using the crystallite group method (CGM). CGM strain analysis allowed us to forecast the nonlinear relationship between strain and sin2Ψ obtained for the thin films due to the strong anisotropy of gold. A least-square method was used to fit the overall experimental data with good accuracy and allows determining all single-crystal elastic constants.