Demystifying Fractal Analysis of Thin Films: A Reference for Thin Film Deposition Processes

In this article, a variety of synthetic (or simulated) surfaces of various morphologies of thin films and their fractal analyses are presented. Similar scaling factors have been used to generate the synthetic images in Gwydion^TM software. The surfaces are based on the actual morphologies arising from various thin film deposition techniques. Using actual thin films of CdTe deposited by radio-frequency (RF) sputtering technique, we have successfully shown that the fractal analyses on the synthetic surfaces can be used to explain, theoretically, the development and self-affinity of various thin films. Based on this validation, the results of fractal analyses on different morphologies of thin films were generated using different fractal methods in Gwydion software. The methods used here include Minkowski functionals, height-to-height correlation, areal autocorrelation, and power spectral density functions. The article will be a good resource for explaining the fractal behavior and morphology of thin films arising from different deposition methods.