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

We have evaporated gold on mica surfaces to produce flat surfaces to be use. 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 nm/s and 360 degrees C. These values matched some published results, while conflicting with others. We will discuss various factors, which possibly cause this discrepancy.