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What is the process for applying a gold coating to polymers using sputtering?
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We have used the Chromium technique when making slides but for our purposes we found this doesn't work as the Chromium diffuses into gold over several days. You can use a technique such as allowing the clean glass slide to soak in PDMS and a solvent for several hours, rinsing, dry (preferably clean air line), and then place into a vacuum/heat chamber and allow the gold to coat the surface of the slide. Done! Check out some scholarly articles...more detailed explanations are available in experimental sections of research journals.
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You're first gonna have to see if your polymer will be able to sustain the temperatures of the plasma discharge that happens during sputtering. If thats ok, your next concern is adhesion. You could probably try a flash of chromium (maybe a few hundreds of angstroms thick layer) and then gold.
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