Fast Fitting of Reflectivity Data of Growing Thin Films Using Neural Networks

10/07/2019

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by   Alessandro Greco, et al.

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X-ray reflectivity (XRR) is a powerful and popular scattering technique that can give valuable insight into the growth behavior of thin films. In this study, we show how a simple artificial neural network model can be used to predict the thickness, roughness and density of thin films of different organic semiconductors (diindenoperylene, copper(II) phthalocyanine and α-sexithiophene) on silica from their XRR data with millisecond computation time and with minimal user input or a priori knowledge. For a large experimental dataset of 372 XRR curves, we show that a simple fully connected model can already provide good predictions with a mean absolute percentage error of 8-18 squares fit using the classical Parratt formalism. Furthermore, current drawbacks and prospects for improvement are discussed.