Self-supporting isotopic chromium thin films

Chromium is a shiny, hard and malleable metal, which can be cold rolled in good quality to a thickness below a micrometer. Thinner foils can be obtained by electron-beam gun evaporation or by electroplating. Isotopically enriched material typically has not the quality for cold rolling processes. As ⁵⁰Cr has a natural abundance of only 4.5 % the enriched material is rather expensive so electron-beam deposition is not a good option because of the inherently low yield of the method. In this contribution we present the preparation of self-supporting ⁵⁰Cr thin films by thermal evaporation out of a tantalum crucible as an alternative to electrodeposition. With the described method we obtained self-supporting films with a thickness between 250 and 620 μg/cm².