Formation of island arrays by melting of Bi, Pb and Sn continuous films on Si substrate

Formation of Island Structures during Melting Process of Tin Films on Amorphous Carbon Substrate

“…According to electron microscopy studies, like for other similar systems [20][21][22], the samples after the melting process consist of particles of spherical form. Their size depends on the mass thickness of the tin film.…”

“…However, the presence of a defective polycrystalline structure in as-deposited films should lead to appearance of an inner size effect [21,22], which consists in a local decrease of the melting temperature. In addition, the non-equilibrium nature of condensates should affect the particularities of their solidphase decomposition [20], which is unavoidable as the result of the heating process to pre-melting temperatures. Thus, in spite of the fact that the dispersion of the films under study is carried out mainly after their melting, the presence of various defects in the initial continuous film has a certain effect on its liquid-phase decomposition.…”

“…During the decomposition process into separate islands of already liquid film, the value of f shows the energy gain in this process and characterizes its efficiency in a certain sense. Further, as in the works [25,26] for f, we will use the term 'excess energy'. The limit value f ∞ corresponds to situation when a film from an infinite area will be gathered into the one drop and determines as asymptote f ∞ = σ l + σ lu − − σ u = σ l (1 − cosθ).…”

“…We note that particles of almost spherical shape arise in a regular manner during the melting process of films on poorly wetted surfaces. In this way, the results of works [20][21][22] indicate that during the melting process of films of fusible metals on oxide or amorphous carbon substrates, the formation of particles of practically spherical shape happens. The average size of such particles is primarily determined by the thickness of the original film.…”

Surface Energy and Wetting in Island Films

“…The results of the study of wetting obtained [9,[42][43][44] and presented in Figure 6 are of separate interest, in particular, for some practical applications (e.g., the formation of ordered nanostructures by film melting [51][52][53]), but at the same time allow to obtain new physical information regarding properties of microparticles. Thus, using the experimental relations θ(R) and σ l (R) one can establish the size dependence of interfacial energy of the microparticle-substrate boundary σ ul .…”