Creation and Characterization of Gold Coated Slides with a Home Built Deposition Chamber

I discuss the creation of gold slides as part of a physics senior thesis at Allegheny College. The device used for making the gold slides was constructed as part of this project. Gold wire was placed in an evacuated chamber along with an array of glass slides. The gold wire is heated and evaporated onto the glass slides, leaving a thin deposition layer. The gold slides are created for the study of hydrophobic materials using surface plasmon resonance (SPR). The use of SPR as the experimental method requires the thickness of the gold layer to be precisely determined. Thus, the thickness of the gold slides is characterized using scanning tunneling microscopy.