Agglomeration and percolation conductivity

We report on results of agglomeration experiments for the Ag/SiO2/Si(100) s ystem. Thin silver films, 100 nm in thickness, were annealed, and their ele ctrical resistance was continuously monitored using a four-point probe tech nique. Scanning electron microscopy and digital image analysis were used to correlate the time-dependent agglomeration morphology to the sheet resista nce of the Ag thin film. Our results indicated that the area fraction of th e surface uncovered during agglomeration scaled linearly in time. We found that at fixed annealing temperature, the normalized sheet resistance follow ed 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 failur e of the sample. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.