Transport of evaporated material through support gas in conjunction with ion plating: I

This paper deals with theoretical and experimental investigations of the thickness distribution of thin films deposited by evaporation under an inert support gas at various pressures. This approach is considered as a first step to describe the material transport in ion plating. In the first part a quantitative treatment based on numerical solutions of the Laplace equation is presented. The solutions are used to calculate the thickness distribution on plane and cylindrical substrate configurations. A comparison of the results with experimental data obtained for silver deposition in argon at pressures of 1.33–6.6 Pa reveals good agreement between measured and calculated thickness distributions of the films. For lower pressures, however, the diffusion model is no longer realistic, and it should be replaced by Monte Carlo calculations of the particle movement. This will be the topic of the second part.