| AVS 55th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Thin Film | Thursday Sessions |
| Session TF-ThP |
| Session: | Aspects of Thin Films |
| Presenter: | J.R. Skuza, College of William & Mary |
| Authors: | J.R. Skuza, College of William & Mary C. Clavero, College of William & Mary R.A. Lukaszew, College of William & Mary |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Noble metal (e.g. Ag, Au) thin films, also in nano-structured form, have recently been the subject of intense research for their possible applications (e.g. chemical and biological sensors, PV devices, etc.). Thermal evaporation is a suitable thin film deposition method that yields high quality Ag thin films. For example, reproducible production of thermally evaporated Ag thin films with tunable surface plasmon resonance wavelengths has been demonstrated with precise control of the deposition parameters.1 Thus, understanding the growth dynamics of Ag thin films onto glass substrates by thermal evaporation and correlating these with optical properties is of great interest to link specific growth parameters to their desired properties. The surface of a film growing under non-equilibrium conditions often develops in agreement with the concept of dynamic scaling, where scaling exponents (e.g. α, β) can be used as the spatial and temporal signatures of highly complex growth processes.2,3 Here, we present a scaling analysis study on the surface morphology of thermally evaporated Ag thin films on glass substrates observed with atomic force microscopy. We find a dramatic change in the scaling exponents as a function of deposition rate, suggesting that there exists an optimum deposition rate in the range of studied values. This implies that there are competing mechanisms during the growth, such as the interaction energy of the adatoms and the substrate and their dynamics on the surface during the early stages of growth. Furthermore, these changes affect the microstructure and also have a profound effect on the optical properties, and in this case, we find that the optical properties of the Ag thin film approach bulk values at the optimum deposition rate.
1 R. Gupta, M. J. Dyer, and W. A. Weimer, J. Appl. Phys. 92, 5264 (2002).
2 F. Family and T. Vicsek, J. Phys. A.: Math. Gen. 18, L75 (1985).
3 F. Family, Physica A 168, 561 (1990).