Universal Fluctuations and Grain Effects in Thin Film Deposition
Fabio D. A. Aarao Reis
Instituto de Fisica, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
ABSTRACT: In this talk, Aarao Reis presents a review of the concepts of kinetic roughening applied to thin film deposition, which helps to connect the microscopic dynamics with the morphological features, particularly the correlations of height fluctuations. He also discusses some of the work his research group is doing in this field. Aarao Reis shows how grainy surface features affect the surface roughness scaling obtained from microscopy images (mainly AFM), possibly leading to incorrect estimates of scaling exponents, thus justifying the development of different methods of analysis. He then discusses applications to Prussian blue and cooper oxide films deposited by electrochemical techniques. In both cases, scaling approaches or the analysis of distributions of roughness, local heights, and extremal heights indicate that roughening is dominated by diffusion of the adsorbed species. Finally, he analyzes images of polycrystalline cadmium telluride films grown by hot-wall epitaxy. Comparing distributions of local and global quantities shows unequivocal evidence of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang scaling.
