Physical vapor deposition

This technique is based on the evaporation of a solid substance in vacuum (by heat in our set-up) followed by the condensation on a backing material to generate thin films. The used set-up consists of a UNIVEX 450 (Leybold vacuum) thermal evaporation system (operational vacuum 10^-4 to 10^-6 mbar) equipped with a sample holder allowing depositing up to 8 samples simultaneously, see Figure. Advantages: it is possible to control the thickness of the deposited layer and obtainment of thin, uniform and homogenous layers. The drawback is the very low deposition yield.