Fabrication and characterization of silver thin films using physical vapor deposition, and the investigation of annealing effects on their structures

Silver nanoparticles have attracted increasing interest due to their chemical stability, catalytic activity, localized surface plasma resonance, and high conductivity. In this article, silver thin films with a thickness of ∼20 nm were fabricated on commercial glass (20 mm × 20 mm) substrate using physical vapor deposition technique, through the bombardment of the electron beam. To check the effect of annealing temperature, the fabricated substrates were annealed at the temperature range of 373.15 K to 1073.15 K with the difference of 100 K under a vacuum condition of ∼0.99 bar at constant time of 20 min; in addition, a single sample that had undergone no annealing effect has also been provided as a reference substrate. We investigated the physical and morphology evaluation information of fabricated annealed silver thin films on the glass substrate using the Ultra-Violet and Visible (UV–vis) spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction (XRD) and the field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). The results obtained from this study show that by increasing the annealing temperature of silver thin films, the flat silver thin films changed into rough silver thin films, by further increment change the silver thin films into silver nano-particles. At the annealed temperature of 1073.15 K, the 20 nm silver thin film was completely removed from the glass as well as bending occurred on the glass substrate. In the end, the absorbance spectra of each sample and the referenced sample were also measured.