Thickness-dependent thin-film resistivity: application of quantitative scanning-tunneling-microscopy imaging

Reiss G, Hastreiter E, Brückl H, Vancea J. Thickness-dependent thin-film resistivity: application of quantitative scanning-tunneling-microscopy imaging. Physical review B. 1990;43(6):5176-5179.The dependence of thin-film resistivity on the thickness is known to be strongly influenced by the interaction of the conduction electrons with the surface. Great efforts have been made in recent years, mainly concerning the quantum-mechanical description of the surface scattering. Detailed discussions of this problem, however, suffer from the lack of information concerning the real topography of thin-film surfaces. The development of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) now gives the chance of direct, quantitative imaging. In this paper, we use the topographic information of STM to improve the fitting of theoretical descriptions to the measured thickness-dependence of the resistivity. The transport parameters obtained from these calculations show a high degree of physical consistency