ABSTRACT
OTS reaction with glass during stamping proceeds through parallel nucleation and growth of many islands. A smaller number of similar size isolated islands was also found in the non-stamped regions. The annealing step appears to have coalesced the OTS island boundaries within the stamped regions but it also greatly increased the number of small OTS islands in the non-stamped bands (Fig. 4B). Interestingly, these islands did not grow in size upon annealing but remained similar in size to the islands found before the annealing process. A distinct, smaller population of larger OTS islands was found on both samples in the region between stamped and non-stamped bands. We conclude that the annealing process affected the extent of surface micro-heterogeneities on the stamped and non-stamped regions differently: it improved the uniformity of stamped OTS regions, while at the same time it decreased the uniformity in the non-stamped regions (Fig. 4A).
