Speaker
Description
Zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films with a thickness of 120 nm were deposited on Si substrates
maintained at 300 °C using the electron beam evaporation technique. The deposited films
were subsequently irradiated with 100 MeV Ag ions at various fluences of 1×10¹⁰, 5×10¹⁰,
1×10¹¹, 3×10¹¹, 7×10¹¹, 1×10¹², 1×10¹³, and 3×10¹³ ions/cm². High-energy heavy ion
irradiation resulted in the formation of self-affine nanostructures on the ZnO thin film
surfaces. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was employed to obtain topographical images of
both pristine and ion-irradiated films. Classical surface roughness parameters, including
arithmetic mean roughness (Sa), root mean square roughness (Sq), skewness (Ssk), kurtosis
(Sku), peak height (Sp), and valley depth (Sv), were evaluated for each surface. Shannon
entropy was used to quantify the topographical uniformity of the rough surfaces. Minkowski
functionals were applied for the quantitative analysis of geometrical and topological surface
features. Furthermore, surface complexity and growth behavior in both lateral and vertical
directions were analyzed using monofractal parameters. Monofractal surfaces are
characterized by homogeneous scaling properties, exhibiting uniform scaling behavior
described by a single singularity exponent.