We have evaporated gold on mica surfaces to produce flat surfaces to b
e use. as substrates in STM experiments. We have experimented with dif
ferent evaporation parameters to find the optimum values for them, sin
ce the parameters representing the results of majority of the publishe
d experiments did not yield good results for us. We found that the mos
t important parameters were evaporation rate and substrate temperature
. The respective optimum values found were 0.3 nm/s and 360 degrees C.
These values matched some published results, while conflicting with o
thers. We will discuss various factors, which possibly cause this disc
repancy.