Dr. Franke Schubert’s area of expertise is in the fast realm of ion beam processing and material fabrication. Her current research interests are focused on the fabrication and characterization of sculptured thin films with the goal to invent new technologies to exploit materials with unique chiral and non-chiral nanoscale structure properties for future electronic device applications. Sculptured thin films are fabricated by using glancing angle deposition utilizing a particle beam, which reaches a substrate surface under a very oblique angle of incidence during the deposition process.
The geometric constellation supports columnar growth with a structure inclination towards the direction of the upcoming particle beam. An instant change of the substrate position relative to the particle beam alters the columnar growth direction yielding to nanoscale building blocks with manifold structure varieties such as post, screws, spirals, zig-zags or combinations thereof. A tremendous opportunity is given by the fact that sculptured thin films can be grown from basically all groups of materials, which are accessible to physical or chemical vapor deposition.
Dr. Franke Schubert’s research is committed to fabricate and investigate new hybrid materials whose physical performance will be designed by a useful combination of intrinsic physical and chemical material properties with the material’s shape and dimension. Exemplary, chiral sculptured thin films may be composed of spiral-like nanoscale building blocks. Each of the spirals can be envisioned as a mechanical spring with a spring constant being mainly dependent on the wire material and its diameter. If the spring is made from a piezoelectric material, e.g. zinc oxide, the compression and expansion can be tuned by a small external electrical voltage applied to the nanosprings. Materials like this are foreseen for next generation electromechanically operated nanoactuators for highly precise positioning of small objects. More applications expected from nanoscale sculptured thin films are envisioned for new types of frequency-tunable long wavelength electromagnetic materials, or materials in photonic or magnetic device applications. Dr. Franke Schubert’s recent contributions to the field include the description of the growth and modification of sculptured thin films upon thermal annealing and an evaluation of their properties in three-dimensional optical nanogratings or for sub-wavelength anti-reflection coatings in the DUV spectral range. Dr. Eva Franke Schubert is currently developing a new deposition tool, which allows the fabrication of sculptured thin films by means of both, electron beam evaporation or ion beam assisted deposition, respectively.
Dr. Eva Franke-Schubert has published her research results in one book chapter, over 70 scientific publications and 11 invited conference presentations. She is a member of the German Physical Society, Materials Research Society and American Vacuum Society. So far, Dr. Franke Schubert gained a total of $ 500,000 external research funding from the German Science Foundation and National Science Foundation and received the Young Faculty Award from the University of Leipzig in 2001. Eva Franke Schubert teaches at the undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Electrical Engineering and has developed new courses on “Fundamentals of Ion-Solid Interactions” and “Electronic Materials for Electrical Engineers,” respectively.

(Spring 2008)