Monitoring morphological and chemical properties during silver solid-state dewetting

Solid-state dewetting phenomenon in silver thin films offers a straightforward method to obtain structures having controlled shape or size -this latter in principle spanning several orders of magnitudes-with potentially strong interest in many applications involving high-tech industry and biomedicine. In this work nanostructured and polycrystalline thin films of silver are deposited by pulsed electron ablation technique and the surface modified upon thermal treatments in air at increasing temperatures. Surface chemistry and morphology are then monitored simultaneously by X-ray photoemission spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy; in particular, the power spectral density of surface heights is used to analyze the alteration of the surface texture induced by annealing. It is found that such a combined approach adds a level of information about the surface as concerns the microscopic processes at the basis of the surface reshaping and elucidates the geometrical meaning of the wavelengths brought into play by the annealing process. Our results are presented in the framework of a multidisciplinary approach, advantages and limitations of which are explored and discussed.