Fabrication of glass fibers uniformly coated with metal films by magnetron sputtering by a two step process involving fixation by a photoresist

Abstract

In this paper, glass fibers with high aspect ratio were used as inner-core templates to prepare core–shell functional particles by way of magnetron sputtering by a two step process involving fixation by a photoresist. The morphologies and constituents of the metal-coated glass fibers were characterized using a scanning electron microscopy and an energy dispersive spectrometer. The crystal structures were characterized by employing X-ray diffraction. The surface roughnesses of glass fibers before and after magnetron sputtering were measured by an atomic force microscope. The results show that the glass fibers after magnetron sputtering have smooth and compact surface coatings, which exhibit face-centered cubic (fcc) structures. The RMS values of the metal-coated glass fibers are 4.20 ± 0.5 nm and 5.74 ± 0.5 nm for aluminum and silver respectively, which are significantly higher than that (1.36 ± 0.2 nm) of original glass fibers. Furthermore, the surface coatings of the glass fibers after electroless silver plating are very poor and there are lots of tiny fragments on them, resulting in high surface roughness (47.70 ± 5 nm). By comparison, the coating qualities of magnetron sputtering are significantly superior to that of electroless plating, indicating that magnetron sputtering is an excellent preparation method of core–shell particles.