FABRICATION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF EXTREMELY SMOOTH LARGE-AREA GOLD SURFACES

We describe our work on gold surfaces that are made by peeling gold fi lms off various smooth glass substrates. We find that we are able to r outinely and reliably produce extremely smooth, large area gold surfac es: typically, for areas less than or equal to 40 mu m square we find the residual roughness of our samples is an order of magnitude less th an that of surfaces produced using conventional techniques. While we i ntend to use these to measure the van der Waals force between alkali a toms and gold surfaces, other potential uses include samples for funda mental surface physics investigations, scanning tunneling microscopy s ubstrates, and reflective optics. We provide details as to how we make these extremely smooth samples and discuss our activities to characte rize them. (C) 1996 American Vacuum Society.