Introduction: Glancing Angle Deposition Technology

Summary

Glancing angle deposition (GLAD) provides a straightforward technique, readily adaptable to conventional physical vapour deposition systems, to fabricate nanoscale helices, chevrons, columns and other porous thin‐film architectures. GLAD is introduced as a combination of top‐down and bottom‐up nanofabrication techniques, and GLAD's fundamental mechanism, self‐shadowing, is discussed. The characteristic GLAD nanocolumnar structures are described, along with the substrate motions required to produce them. The advantages of GLAD, including nanoscale control of architecture over a broad material set and compatibility with standard microelectronic fabrication processes, are discussed. A brief overview is given of GLAD's origins and history and of Monte Carlo approaches to computer simulation. The most important experimental parameters affecting the GLAD process are introduced, along with prescriptions for bringing those parameters under control. Finally, the major application areas of GLAD films are introduced. GLAD films have been used as electrodes and used for energy production and storage applications, including photovoltaics, fuel cells, Li‐ion batteries and water splitting. The highly adaptable, porous nanostructure of GLAD films has found application to impedance and surface‐enhanced Raman spectroscopy sensing for several analytes. One of the most fully developed applications of GLAD films has been optical thin films, where the nanostructural control offered by GLAD can engineer birefringence, leading to precise optical interference coatings.