Smart Cut™ is a technology discovered at CEA and now industrially used for the manufacture of advanced substrates for electronics. However, the physical phenomena involved are still the focus of numerous studies at CEA. In Smart Cut™, a thin material layer is transferred from one wafer to another using a key fracture annealing step upon which a macroscopic fracture initiate & propagates at several km/s [i].
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Improving technology requires a solid understanding of the physical phenomena involved in the fracture step. The aim of this PhD project is thus to address the mechanisms involved in fracture initiation, propagation and post-fracture vibrations
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On the CEA-Grenoble site, with industrial interest, the student will use and further develop existing experimental setups to investigate the fracture behavior in brittle materials, including optical laser reflections [iv], time-resolved synchrotron diffracting imaging [iii], and ultra-fast direct imaging [ii].
In addition, python-based data analysis algorithms will be developed to extract quantitative information from the different datasets. This will enable the student to determine involved mechanisms and evaluate the influence of the wafer processing parameters on the fracture behavior, and thus propose improvement methods.

References :
[i] https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apl/article/107/9/092102/594044
[ii] https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.15.024068
[ii] https://journals.iucr.org/j/issues/2022/04/00/vb5040/index.html
[iv] https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jap/article/129/18/185103/158396