TABLE OF CONTENTS Thin films began to be produced in the mid 1800s following the development of vacuum systems and sources of electricity (Mattox 2003). The first recorded thin films, created by physical vapor deposition (PVD), were made by Grove (Grove 1852) in 1852 when he sputtered metallic films by applying a voltage between a wire and a silver substrate at a reduced pressure. Discovery of internal structure in films is attributed to Kundt (Kundt 1886) who noted the rotation of polarisation of light in transmission through thin films of iron, cobalt and nickel in 1884. Direct observation of physical structure, however, had to await the development of the transmission electron microscope (TEM), and was not made until 1966 by Niewenhuizen and Haanstra (Niewenhuizen and Haanstra 1966).
Thin films made under suitable conditions were observed to be composed of columnar structures on the nanometer scale. Electron micrographs, which they painstakingly made by producing transparent replicas for the TEM, are now made much more easily and routinely with the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Within the last 10 years or so the technology has developed to control the morphology of the columnar structure to produce sculptured thin films (STFs) (Lakhtakia and Messier 2004). Rotating and tilting the substrate while depositing the film can engineer the columnar structures engineered to a wide variety of nanowire shapes. Thus sculptured thin films have entered the growing number of technologies in the exploding...
