AVS 58th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition
    Thin Film Division Wednesday Sessions
       Session TF2+EM-WeA

Invited Paper TF2+EM-WeA1
Templated Solid-State Dewetting for Patterning of Films

Wednesday, November 2, 2011, 2:00 pm, Room 110

Session: Nanostructuring Thin Films
Presenter: Carl Thompson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Authors: C.V. Thompson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
J. Ye, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A.L. Giermann, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Correspondent: Click to Email
Most crystalline thin films are metastable in the as-deposited state, and will dewet to form islands when they are heated to temperatures that lead to sufficiently high atomic mobilities. This can happen well below the melting temperature of the film, so that the material remains in the form of a crystalline solid throughout the dewetting process. When unpatterned films dewet on flat substrates, the resulting islands have widely varying sizes and spacings. However, we have shown that substrate patterning can be used to control the solid-state dewetting process and to produce ordered arrays of monodispersed and crystallographically aligned islands from polycrystalline films. Recent experiments on patterned single-crystal films have allowed independent study of the various mechanisms that control structure evolution during solid-state dewetting. These include fingering instabilities, edge faceting, corner instabilities, pinch-off processes, and Rayleigh-like instabilities. Surface energy anisotropy plays a very important role in these processes, and for single-crystal films, leads to the formation of crystallographically aligned complex patterns of lines and islands that can be reproducibly controlled through pre-patterning.