Leaver K.D., Chapman B.N. Thin Films

Wykeham Publications Ltd., 1971 - 112 p.
ISBN: 0-85109-230-6What is a thin film? A film is simply a layer of material; while the term thin is imprecise, it is generally used to describe a layer of thickness less than about 1 um. The study of thin films of solid materials is old by modern standards, but recent years have seen a burgeoning of activity which has now become so great that the subject is a major component of today’s physics of the solid state. The field covered by this book is necessarily only a small part of a large and complicated subject, which is in principle even larger than the study of materials in bulk. For a thin film, being simply a thin slice from a material, has all the properties of that material, albeit modified by the special way in w'hich it has been made and by the fact that it has a very large ratio of surface to volume.