3-D surface stereometry studies of sputtered TiN thin films obtained at different substrate temperatures Sebastian Stach 1 • Wiktoria Sapota 1 • S ¸ tefan T ¸a ˘lu 2 • Azin Ahmadpourian 3 • Carlos Luna 4 • Nader Ghobadi 5 • Ali Arman 6 • Mohsen Ganji 5 Received: 2 August 2016 / Accepted: 1 October 2016 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract Nanostructured glass-supported thin films of titanium nitride (TiN) were prepared by reactive magnetron sputtering at different substrate temperatures (from 25 to 400 °C). The surface topography of such films was examined by atomic force microscopy (AFM). The obtained 3-D AFM images was divided into motifs of significant peaks and pits using MountainsMap Ò Premium software, which uses the watershed segmentation algorithm. In the motif analysis, parameters consistent with ISO 25178-2: 2012 and that characterize essential characteristics of the segmented motifs in terms of surface dimensions, volume, curvature, shape, structure, etc. were calculated, and the highest and lowest points of motifs were localized. This study allowed us to perform a quantitative correlation between synthetic conditions of TiN thin films and their 3-D micro-textured surface properties. Concretely, we found a non-monotonic dependence of the surface morphology properties of the thin films on the substrate temperature during the sample depo- sition, obtaining the most regular surface at a substrate temperature of 250 °C and the most irregular topography at the substrate temperature of 400 °C. 1 Introduction Recent developments in fundamental knowledge to char- acterize thin film microstructures at the micro/nano level can bring important improvements in the functionality and quality of the analysed product [1–5]. The 3-D nanopattern of thin film plays an important role in establishing the microstructure–property relations since many macroscopic properties depend strongly on geometrical variability of the micro-constituents [6–10]. Consequently, the main current challenge in the investigation of thin films is to correlate the surface microstructure features of the thin films to their physicochemical properties in order to understand the causes of the wide phenomenology that exhibit these low dimensional materials, and how it could be tailored for specific technological applications. On the other hand, the 3-D surface micro morphology is a major characteristic in the engineering surface design and provides a rigorous 3-D description of the features in the microstructure for char- acterization of physical, chemical, and thermodynamic processes [11–13]. Furthermore, it is known that the tex- tures of most engineering surfaces are random, either iso- tropic or anisotropic, and either Gaussian or non-Gaussian [6, 11]. The description of the surface topography & Azin Ahmadpourian azinahmadpourian@gmail.com & Ali Arman ali.arman173@gmail.com 1 Department of Biomedical Computer Systems, Institute of Informatics, Faculty of Computer Science and Materials Science, University of Silesia, Be ˛dzin ´ska 39, 41-205 Sosnowiec, Poland 2 Department of AET, Discipline of Descriptive Geometry and Engineering Graphics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, 103-105 B-dul Muncii St., 400641 Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania 3 Departments of Physics, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran 4 Facultad de Ciencias Fı ´sico Matema ´ticas (FCFM), Universidad Auto ´noma de Nuevo Leo ´n (UANL), Av. Universidad, 66455 San Nicola ´s de los Garza, Nuevo Leo ´n, Mexico 5 Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Malayer University, Malayer, Iran 6 Young Researchers and Elite Club, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran 123 J Mater Sci: Mater Electron DOI 10.1007/s10854-016-5774-9