Thermal Evaporation Instructions (W-103)

Sample cleaning and mounting

1) Take a small piece of the material to be deposited, weigh it and bend so that it can hang from the
Tungsten filament wire.
2) Organic vapor clean the weighed piece with TCE, Acetone and Methanol in that order.
3) Close the butterfly valve (if not closed) and introduce air into the deposition chamber through the
back-side air-inlet valve.
4) Lift the glass bell-jar and place the weighed material on the Tungsten filament wire.
5) Place the masked sample on top of the hole in deposition plate. The height of sample to filament
must be set as required.
6) Use the evaporation shutter must cover the region from where the material will evaporate.

Starting evaporation process

7) Put the glass bell-jar cover back to its position carefully and close the back-side air-inlet valve.
Open the butterfly valve and check that the glass bell-jar is held firm due to preexisting vacuum in
the Turbo pump chamber below.
8) Turn on the room exhaust fan and the vacuum gauge monitor (Varian).
9) Turn on the Rotary pump and then open the Rotary isolation valve after a minute.
10) After vacuum reaches below ~5*10-2 mbar, turn on the water chiller and Turbo pump (Adixen).
11) After the Turbo pump has attained its highest speed (the low vacuum Pirani thermal gauge may
go out of scale), turn on the high vacuum Bayard-Alpert (BA) ionization gauge to check the
vacuum and the switch it off.
12) After 30min switch on the BA gauge again to check the vacuum level. Keep checking
periodically till the vacuum reaches ~2*10-6 mbar (takes approximately 2 hours).
13) Turn on the transformer and slowly increase the voltage to the point when the material to be
deposited melts and covers the wire or forms a blob. The voltage required for this will
depend on the Tungsten wire thickness and the evaporation material.
15) Open the shutter and let deposition happen for the desired period of time.

Shut down procedure

16) Reduce transformer voltage to zero and turn it off.
17) Switch off the BA gauge and then close the butterfly valve.
18) Turn off the Turbo pump.
19) Turn off the Rotary isolation valve and then the Rotary pump.
20) Turn off the water chiller and the exhaust fan.
21) Wait for at least 30min to let things cool down hour before releasing the vacuum and opening the
glass cover for taking the sample out. This is to avoid oxidation of the deposited material and the
filament.