  Understanding the nucleation and growth of polycrystalline thin films is a
long-standing goal. Polycrystalline films have many grains with different
orientations that affect thin-film properties. Numerous studies have been done
to determine these grain size and their preferred crystallographic orientation
as well as stress in films. However most past studies have either employed an
ex-situ methodology or only monitor the development of macroscopic stress in
real-time. There has never been any research done on the simultaneous
determination of crystallographic texture, grain size, and microscopic stress
in polycrystalline thin films. In this study, we simultaneously monitored the
generation and temporal evolution of texture, grain size, and internal stress
in cathodic arc evaporated Al0.50Ti0.50N thin films using a bespoke deposition
apparatus designed for use with 2-dimensional synchrotron x-ray diffraction
technique. The influence of the substrate temperature is investigated in terms
of the emergence and development of texture, grain size and stress evolution. A
dynamic evolution of the crystallographic texture is observed as the overall
film thickness varies. We clearly resolved two regime of films growth based on
stress evolution. Beyond a threshold grain size (~ 14 nm), the stress scales
inversely to the average grain sizes, and as the film thickness increases,
immediate compressive stress relaxation was seen. An extensive ex-situ
evaluation of thin films using electron microscopies and electron diffraction
was performed to support the in-situ x-ray diffraction results.
