Production of large metallic clusters by thermal evaporation

Cluster beam evaporation has been used to produce metallic and semiconductor thin films for microelectronic applications. Previous work showed that the deposition of large clusters of antimony )Sb2000.onto silicon substrates and carbon films can be performed by thermal evaporation through a nozzle orifice and has been modelled using molecular diffusion theory. The results here show that the model can be extended to include other metals e.g., Ag.. TEM shows that cluster sizes in the case of Ag are much smaller than for Sb, having a di-similar statistical spread. Photoluminescence of Mg, Sb and Ag films show decreasing PL intensity with temperature which correlates with the expected concentration of clusters. q1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved