Morphology and crystal texture in tilted columnar micro-structured titanium thin film coatings

Changes in the morphology of Ti films deposited at a vapor incidence angle of 84° and nominal thickness of 3 μm at substrate temperatures corresponding to homologous temperatures of 0.15, 0.4, and 0.5 are studied, and compared to the Mukherjee and Gall structure zone model, proposed for high temperature glancing angle deposition. The observed morphology changes are consistent with their model of competition between shadowing length and adatom diffusion length. All the films were grown with homologous temperature lower than 0.5, and formed porous and inclined micro-column morphology, resulting from the dominance of shadowing over adatom surface diffusion.