Abstract
The topographies of various surfaces have been studied in many fields due to the significant influence that surfaces have on the practical performance of a given sample. A comprehensive evaluation requires the assistance of fractal analysis, which is of significant importance for modern science and technology. Due to the deep insights of fractal theory, fractal analysis on surface topographies has been widely applied and recommended. In this paper, the remarkable uprising in recent decades of fractal analysis on the surfaces of thin films, an essential domain of surface engineering, is reviewed. By summarizing the methods used to calculate fractal dimension and the deposition techniques of thin films, the results and trends of fractal analysis are associated with the microstructure, deposition parameters, etc. and this contributes profoundly to exploring the mechanism of film growth under different conditions. Choosing appropriate methods of surface characterization and calculation methods to study diverse surfaces is the main challenge of current research on thin film surface topography by using fractal theory. Prospective developing trends are proposed based on the data extraction and statistics of the published literature in this field.
Highlights
Surface topography is one of the important indicators in thin film analysis and surface quality evaluation [1]
Except the topographic images with height matrices obtained by atomic force microscopy (AFM) or scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the grayscale images obtained by using other instruments such as scanning electron microscope (SEM) have been reported to carry out fractal analysis
Soumya et al [43] studied ZnS thin films prepared with the Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method at different annealing temperatures and analyzed the surface topography based on AFM image data
Summary
Surface topography is one of the important indicators in thin film analysis and surface quality evaluation [1]. The possible reason is that the newly absorbed atomic layers are correlated with their adjacent, deposited surface during diffusion process [13–17] They showed that the scale dependence of surface roughness can be revealed by calculating the fractal dimension (FD). The commonly used calculation methods of FD include the box counting (BC) method, the Higuchi method, the power spectrum density (PSD) method, the structure function (SF) method, the autocorrelation function (ACF) method, height-height correlation function, and the traditional roughness (TR) method According to their calculation principles, their applicable occasions and result accuracies are different. The authors have reviewed the methods of both the fractal analysis on surfaces and the deposition techniques of thin films, summarizing the related results and trends in this field. Future development trends in this field are proposed and discussed
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