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The life-time of industrial products and the performance of materials for advanced
mechanical applications are more and more often enhanced by coatings which, for
instance, can act as thermal barriers in turbine engineering, constitute electrical
connectors in silicon technology, improve wear and corrosion resistance in a variety of
working tools [1]. Thermal, electrical and mechanical characteristics of coatings are of
great interest for their application, but a further important macroscopic property to be
estimated is adhesion across the interface region, strictly dependent on the deposition
technique and on the mechanical/physical properties of the film and of its substrate, see
e.g. [2].