Anisotropic phenomena in as-evaporated amorphous chalcogenide thin films

The changes in refractive index and birefringence in as-evaporated AsxS1-x amorphous films have been measured by means of prism-coupling technique. In particular, the time evolution, annealing and substrate temperature effects, compositional dependencies of the optical anisotropy on the fresh amorphous films are investigated. The analyse of these effects in terms of a proposed microscopic model are discussed. Such a model is shown to qualitatively explain some aspects of this phenomenon. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.