Thin film island growth kinetics: a grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering study of gold on glass

Morphological characterization of ion-sputtered C–Ag, C/C–Ag and Ag/C films by GISAXS

“…Note that we have not taken into account the refraction effects at the entrance and the exit of the layer to determine our experimental values; however, these effects are relatively small for the size and distance range of our clusters, as has been shown elsewhere (Levine et al, 1991;Kutsch et al, 1997). Now we wish to discuss the growth mechanism that takes place during the co-sputtering of carbon and silver.…”

“…As was demonstrated by Levine et al (1989) in a study of clusters deposited on a¯at surface or embedded in the matrix of a thin layer, SAXS experiments have to be carried out at or near the critical angle of the material. This allows a considerable increase of the X-ray path inside the thin layer to be analysed, while the background remains suf®ciently low (Levine et al, 1991;Naudon & Thiaudie Á re, 1996). The present study reports the synthesis of ion-sputtered C±Ag, C/C±Ag and Ag/C thin ®lms and their detailed morphological characterization by SAXS under grazing-incidence (GISAXS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray re¯ec-tometry and atomic force microscopy (AFM).…”

Probing surface and interface morphology with Grazing Incidence Small Angle X-Ray Scattering

“…In 1989, the first GISAXS experiments were performed with a rotating anode by J. Levine et al on Au deposits on glass [16,17,51]. Naudon et al developed also GISAXS at LURE (Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation du Rayonnement Electromagnétique, France) in order to study clustering near surfaces [52,18,[53][54][55][56].…”

“…Since the first experiments [16][17][18], the Grazing Incidence Small Angle X-Ray Scattering (GISAXS) technique has emerged in the last decade as a powerful tool to analyze the morphology and distribution of either islands on a substrate or buried particles, in parallel with the wide angle X-ray scattering techniques under grazing incidence, which provide unique average information on their atomic structure, strain and composition. The ability of GISAXS to characterize granular multilayered systems [19], implanted systems [20], as well as semiconductor quantum dots obtained by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) or liquid phase epitaxy (LPE) is now well established [21][22][23][24].…”

Determination of the local gold contact morphology on a photoactive polymer film using nanobeam GISAXS

“…Alternatively, GISAXS can be envisaged as the extension of grazing incidence diffraction (GID) to small scattering angles or as a sort of diffuse reflectivity. Consequently, three different X-ray communities, SAXS, GID and diffuse reflectivity are converging through GISAXS [1][2][3][4][5]. Today's success of GISAXS is featured by the ability to access (1) averaged statistical significant information over all the illuminated sample area (which is for common beam sizes in the range of square centimeters), (2) buried structures, which are located well below the surface and thus are inaccessible to local probe techniques such as AFM and SEM, (3) depth dependent structural information using different incident angles, (4) structures in any kind of environments ranging from ultra-high vacuum to gas atmospheres and liquids, (5) kinetic studies performed as function of external parameters such as temperature, gas pressure, pH or ion concentration and (6) structures in a noninvasive and non-destructive way.…”