It is always recommended to have an adhesion layer of titanium/chromium which will strongly stick gold onto the glass substrate otherwise there is very high possibility of delamination during measurements. Thanks

Hi Seyede,

I have not done metal self supported films myself, but thin carbon, and polymer. Firstly it depends how thick the film is going to be. The usual technique is to clean the slide, and dip coat it with some water with a little surfactant in, such as washing up liquid! Scrape the edges of the slide with a razor blade to break the edges free, and then slowly lower it (at a shallow angle) into a tub of water to allow the water to get under the film and lift it off. (You will see a concave meniscus where the water meets the slide, when it manages to start to get under the layer). You would probably find it quite hard to get the film actually under the water as a self supported film, as it will want to fold up on itself, with the pressure of the surface tension. It can be very hard to get the film to separate from the slide however, and its a bit of a black art, with different people doing different things.. no surfactant, no cleaning, super intense cleaning...

You could consider having a polymer bottom layer that you dissolve off after coating, Polyvinyl-formal dissolved in chloroform is often used for such self supporting films.

I've not sputtered gold before. In my experience, gold is typically evaporated thermally or with e-beam assisted PVD. Sputtered films can have somewhat rougher surfaces compared to a high-vacuum PVD film, unless you optimize the parameters carefully. To obtain smoother films via sputtering, usually the parameters of optimization are gas flow-rate, chamber pressure, sample temperature (I think for gold it should be close to room temp), sample stage rotation speed (slower the better, but not too slow!) and base pressure (lower the better, should be lower than 10^-6 mbar).

I've used Remover PG, which is a proprietary NMP solution from Microchem, for cleaning samples with PVD evaporated gold on them. In my experience, NMP doesn't attack gold.

You may possibly want to check this discussion ― on gold adhesion to glass substrate: https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_I_improve_Gold-Glass_adhesion

It is always recommended to have an adhesion layer of titanium/chromium which will strongly stick gold onto the glass substrate otherwise there is very high possibility of delamination during measurements. Thanks

Thank you all so much