Evaporation of gold thin films on mica: effect of evaporation parameters

We have evaporated gold on mica surfaces to produce flat surfaces to be used as substrates in STM experiments. We have experimented with different evaporation parameters to find the optimum values for them, since the parameters representing the results of majority of the published experiments did not yield good results for us. We found that the most important parameters were evaporation rate and substrate temperature. The respective optimum values found were 0.3 nmrs and 3608C. These values matched some published results, while conflicting with others. We will discuss various factors, which possibly cause this discrepancy.