Morphological characterisation and microstructure of silver films prepared by electrodeposition method

Abstract

The electrodeposition method is used to prepare silver films at different thickness. In order to characterise the films, scaling law analysis was done using concept of fractal. We obtained a growth exponent, β = 0.61 and average roughness exponent, α = 0.62 using root mean square roughness and height–height correlation function. The results indicate that the films with higher thickness have higher surface roughness. However the fractal analysis using height–height correlation shows that the value of fractal dimension decreases from 2.45 to 2.33 depending on the thickness of films. On the other hand the increase of thickness influenced the lateral correlation length strongly. Thus, these features may be controlled by choosing an optimum film thickness.

Keywords:

• Silver film
• fractal analysis
• surface morphology
• height–height correlation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.