Determination of Surface Structural Complexity of Solid-State Materials

Abstract

In this paper we analyzed methods of investigating structure features in solid-state materials and developed a new algorithm for determining the surface structural complexity of these materials based on the two-dimensional detrended fluctuation analysis and the scale-space analysis. It is proposed to evaluate the surface structural complexity by calculating tangent of the angle of the fluctuation – spatial scale function and number of breakpoints on the fluctuation – spatial scale function. The developed algorithm was tested on the surface image of the Si layer implanted by Ag<sup>+<?sup> ions, subjected to the pulsed laser annealing. We found that investigated surface belongs to the type of surfaces with a high structural complexity. It was also shown that the scaling index – smoothing coefficient (scale) dependence can be used to study the dynamics of changes in the correlation properties of the surface. Knowledge about surface structural complexity of solid-state materials can be used to determine the material functional purpose in different fields of science.