Pulsed DC-plasma sputtering induced synthesis of hydrogenated carbon thin films for L-929 cell cultivation

Carbon films, due to the inspiring multifunctional performance along with mechanical properties, have sufficient potential in development of biomedical applications. In this work, amorphous carbon (a-C), and hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) thin films are grown using unbalanced pulsed DC magnetron sputtering under varying the conditions of working pressure, and reactive gas content. The effect of synthesis parameters on the surface topography, microstructural, sheet resistance, wettability and surface energy of the grown films has been investigated. Highly smooth surfaces were found with root mean square roughness < 1.0 nm variation. The films are found hydrophilic and without much variation in surface energy (56.5 to 58.1 mJ/m²) on hydrogenation. However, almost 8 order sheet resistance is found to increase (from 4.5 × 10² Ω/sq. to 2.2 × 10¹⁰ Ω/sq) by adding and increasing the hydrogen content. The cell viability results against the fibroblast L-929 cells show that the hydrogen incorporation into the amorphous carbon film promotes excellent improvement in cell adhesion and proliferation.