Morphological study of metal/dielectric composite films with various spatial distributions of metal particles

Morphological properties of metal/dielectric composite films consisting of individual metal particles in a dielectric matrix were studied by methods of computational physics. The simulated composite structures were prepared by hard-sphere and soft-sphere models with given spatial distribution of objects ranging from totally random, through various degrees of order up to anisotropic in certain directions. The images of sections of generated composite films were processed using the two strongest morphological methods – of “Voronoi tessellation” and “covariance function” with the aim to analyse the spatial distribution of particles in the composite film and to reveal the possible irregularities in this distribution. The results show that both the methods can effectively help to quantify the degree of particles arrangement as well as the anisotropy of structures studied.