Characterization of Microroughness Parameters in Titanium Nitride Thin Films Grown by DC Magnetron Sputtering

Micromorphology characterization of copper thin films by AFM and fractal analysis

“…1d that as the layer thicknesses is increased, the surface morphology of the samples display two Gaussian contributions. This behavior is caused by the aggregation of the native grains into larger clusters and formation of new phase [40][41][42].…”

“…It is known that engineering surfaces are often random, isotropic or anisotropic, and either Gaussian or non-Gaussian [14,15]. Different studies about the characterization of 3-D surface morphology of thin films have been reported in the literature [16][17][18][19][20], and in several of them, the 3-D topography of thin films obtained from AFM data have been characterized in terms of fractal [20][21][22][23] and multifractal [24][25][26][27][28] geometry. It is known that the fractal/multifractal 3-D surface geometries are characterized by scaling independence and possess only statistical self-similarity, which takes place only in the restricted range of the spatial scales [21][22][23].…”

Comment on: “Characterization of Microroughness Parameters in Titanium Nitride Thin Films Grown by DC Magnetron Sputtering” [J Fusion Energ DOI 10.1007/s10894-012-9510-z]

“…According to Ali Gelali et al [1], AFM image analysis section, in line 5 is written RRMS which is not correct and it should be written R rms . Also, in line 10 the second h i related to Eq.…”

“…Afterwards authors clime that the low frequency components of the PSD spectrum represent the aggregates [1] however, according to AFM images particle's aggregation is only can be seen in sample 3 and not for sample 1 and 2.…”

“…On the whole, PSD function is used because it can show changes better than RMS Roughness providing RMS changes will be little as can be seen in introduction of [1]. By considering this issue, one can see from Table 2 [1] that change between RMS is high which is not proper to use PSD function and make some errors and of course is against the introduction and conclusion.…”