Island Growth of Poly(chloro-p-xylylene) Coatings

Abstract

Abstract The evolution of the morphology of island poly(chloro-p-xylylene) films formed on silicon substrates by vapor deposition polymerization is investigated by atomic force microscopy. The dependences of the effective thickness of the island coating, the number density of polymer islands, and their average size on the surface coverage are studied. The maximal density of polymer islands and the surface coverage corresponding to the transition to the coalescence regime are estimated. Within the framework of the theory of dynamic scaling, the size distribution of islands and the size distribution of their “capture zones” are analyzed. It is shown that, at low degrees of filling of the substrate, before the coalescence of islands, these distributions are described by scaling functions corresponding to the model of reaction-limited aggregation. The size of the critical nucleus is estimated from the size distributions of the “capture zones” of polymer islands.