Elaboration and characterisation of thin films

Thin films have many practical applications in fields as diverse as optics, electronics, sensors and mechanics. It has therefore become absolutely essential to know and understand the mechanisms of thin-film growth for the realization of these devices. This is the aim of this work, which is presented in a manuscript structured into four chapters.The first chapter is devoted to introducing some notions of surface structure, followed by a description of a few types of surface.In the second chapter, we give a fairly general presentation of substrate treatments.In the third chapter, we present the various stages of sample preparation prior to thin-film deposition. In this section, we also present the various thin-film deposition techniques, along with their applications, advantages and disadvantages. Characterization techniques (structural, chemical composition, optical properties, electrical and mechanical properties) are the subject of the fourth chapter.