In an effort to address the understanding of the origin of growth stress in thin films deposited under very energetic conditions, the authors investigated the stress state and microstructure of Mo thin films grown by ion beam sputtering (IBS) as well as the stress relaxation processes taking place during subsequent thermal annealing or ion irradiation. Different sets of samples were grown by varying the IBS deposition parameters, namely, the energy Eo and the flux j of the primary ion beam, the target-to-sputtering gas mass ratio M-1/M-2 as well as film thickness. The strain-stress state was determined by x-ray diffraction using the sin(2) psi method and data analyzed using an original stress model which enabled them to correlate information at macroscopic (in terms of stress) and microscopic (in terms of defect concentration) levels. Results indicate that these refractory metallic thin films are characterized by a high compressive growth stress (-2.6 to -3.8 GPa), resulting from the creation of a large concentration (up to similar to 1.4%) of point or cluster defects, due to the atomic peening mechanism. The M-1/M2 mass ratio enables tuning efficiently the mean deposited energy of the condensinc, atoms; thus, it appears to be the more relevant deposition parameter that allows modifying both the microstructure and the stress level in a significant way. The growth stress comes out to be highly unstable. It can be easily relaxed either by postgrowth thermal annealing or ion irradiation in the hundred keV range at very low dose [< 0.1 dpa (displacement per atom)]. it is shown that thermal annealing induces deleterious effects such as oxidation of the film surface, decrease of the film density, and in some cases adhesion loss at the film/substrate interface, while ion irradiation allows controlling the stress level without generating any macroscopic damage. (c) 2007 American Vacuum Society.