Effect of incident molecular temperature on the elementary processes in thin film growth of long-chain molecules during vacuum deposition

The growth rate of thin-film growth by vacuum deposition is controlled by changing the evaporation source temperature. However, the temperature of molecules incident on the substrate also changes at the same time. In this work, we investigated the effect of incident molecular temperature on the thin-film growth of long-chain molecules using a quartz crystal microbalance and found incident-molecular-temperature-dependent adsorption behavior. The kinetic analysis considering a metastable state suggested that the incident molecular temperature affects unstable and metastable molecules during nucleation. These results indicate that thin-film formation starts before the molecules incident on the substrate have cooled to substrate temperature.