Morphological and multifractal properties of Cr thin films deposited onto different substrates

Microsc Res Tech. 2023 Feb;86(2):157-168. doi: 10.1002/jemt.24242. Epub 2022 Oct 12.

Abstract

In this study, the morphological properties and micro-roughness of chromium thin film prepared by thermal evaporation technique and confirmed via EDS analysis are examined on different substrates of BK7, Silicon (Si), and glass using atomic force microscope analysis (AFM). Analysis of amplitude parameters, Minkowski functionals, and films' spatial microtexture extracted from AFM analysis showed the difference between glass substrate and the other two (BK7 and Si) substrates for the growth of chromium thin films. In addition, we observed robust signatures of multifractality of the Cr thin films deposited on all substrates we studied. Moreover, we highlight that the Glass substrates displayed the strongest multifractality indicating that such samples present space filling properties distributed over more spatial scales than the samples of BK7 and Si.

Keywords: Minkowski functionals; atomic force microscopy; microtexture; morphology; multifractal analysis; thin films.