Structural and elastic properties of zirconium nitride–aluminum nitride multilayers

We have synthesized a series of zirconium nitride--aluminum nitride multilayers with a reactive sputtering technique. Structure and elastic response of these multilayers are characterized by x-ray-diffraction and transient piezoreflectance measurements. We observe a systematic decrease of the longitudinal elastic response in the direction of film growth as the composition modulation wavelength decreases. This contradicts a recent model of elastic response which predicts the absence of elastic anomaly in metal-insulator multilayers.