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Stephen Riedel1, Anja Habenicht1, Ramon Pelaez2, Carmen Afonso2, Johannes Boneberg1, Paul Leiderer1 Universität Konstanz, Fachbereich Physik, 78457 Konstanz, Germany Laser Processing Group, Instituto de Optica, CSIC, Serrano 121, 28006 Madrid, Spain Most metals do not wet inert surfaces, like the surface of oxides or graphite. Therefore, thin metallic films should not be stable on a surface like glass. Yet it is well known that such films can easily be prepared, e.g. by means of evaporation or sputtering. These films are, however, not in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, but are quench-condensed and are kinetically hindered to undergo dewetting. If the temperature is high enough that thermal diffusion of surface atoms becomes relevant, or if the metal film is even molten by a short laser pulse, then dewetting sets in. We show several examples for these processes, on the one hand for homogeneous thin films, which are irradiated by laser pulses with spatially periodic intensity distributions, and on the other hand for metallic nanostructures which, depending on the duration of the laser pulse, exhibit partial or complete melting. The energy released by dewetting gives rise to interesting mechanical phenomena on the nanoscale, for which several examples are presented. |
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