Thermal diffusion driven Island formation and fragmentation of size-selected Ag-nanocluster films

Abstract

In this work, we report the investigations of the morphology of size-selected Ag-nanocluster (NC) deposited films on untreated Si (100) and Rapid thermal annealed (RTA) Si(100) wafers as a function of substrate temperature. We observe that the mean size of the deposited nanoclusters increases with the increase of substrate temperature when deposited on untreated Si (100) while the mean size of the nanoclusters decreases with the increase of the substrate temperature for RTA Si (100). Here diffusion and aggregation of the deposited Ag-NC are considered as primary factors for the change of the mean size of Ag-NC which is also supported by the height distributions of the Ag-NC, where the average height is almost constant for each set of samples.