Wavelet Based Structural Analysis of Electroless Deposits in the Diffusion Limited Regime

We discuss the actual relevance of thin gap geometry electrodeposition to generate fractal patterns that mimic the morphology of Witten and Sander's diffusion-limited aggregates (DLA). Eliminating migration and convection, as well as electrochemical side reactions, we show that electroless deposition is a good candidate to meet the requirements for diffusion to be the rate limiting step of the growth process. We use the wavelet transform microscope to achieve a comparative structural characterization of both experimental electroless deposits and numerical DLA clusters. The fact that five-fold symmetry and Fibonacci hierarchical ordering are found as common predominant statistical features is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration, relying on an appropriate structural fractal analysis, of the existence of DLA morphologies in an experimental context.