Guest post provided by Denton Vacuum, LLC, distributing vacuum deposition systems for a variety of high heat and high pressure environments. Visit their website for more product details.
For a variety of applications, many industries are using the thermal evaporation system for optical thin films. This commonly used technique requires the use of vacuum sputtering system, a highly sensitive machine that allows for temperatures that match plasma levels of our sun. The high heat, high pressure chambers allow materials such as metal and carbon to melt into a vaporous gas, which is then condensed on a target material in the form of a thin film. Controlling the physical and optical properties of the film deposited is extremely important for quality control.
Knowing how to evaluate the effectiveness of how your sputter deposition system is depositing your films will help you control the outcomes of the procedure. Depending on what equipment you choose to use, you can measure the quality of the thin films deposited on your target material. The most common device used to measure the quality of a sputtering system is a recording spectrophotometer. Spectral measurements can be taken with this device on single coatings and some multilevel coatings to measure the optical properties of the film. This essentially means that those using the tool to measure the quality of a film can analyze how light passes through it.
Although certain tools can be used to measure reflection and transmission data to extract the optical properties of a single layer thin film material, the real world accuracy and precision of measured data is not as clear. Thin films do not display perfect homogeneity which can cause difficulty in analyzing results.
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