Agglomeration and percolation conductivity

We report on results of agglomeration experiments for the Ag/SiO2/Si(100) system. Thin silver films, 100 nm in thickness, were annealed, and their electrical resistance was continuously monitored using a four-point probe technique. Scanning electron microscopy and digital image analysis were used to correlate the time-dependent agglomeration morphology to the sheet resistance of the Ag thin film. Our results indicated that the area fraction of the surface uncovered during agglomeration scaled linearly in time. We found that at fixed annealing temperature, the normalized sheet resistance followed power-law scaling in time, i.e., R similar to \t-tau\(-mu), (mu =1.25 +/-0.1) where tau corresponds to the time it takes to reach electrical failure of the sample. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.