Structured silicon based anodes are promising for their high cycleability and rate performance. Because, the nanostructures can provide facile relaxation to prevent electrode pulverization. Plus, they maintain effective electrical contacts in cycling and provide short Li diffusion distances improving their electrochemical performances. Among alternative production methods, glancing angle evaporation becomes prominent since it enables to deposit SiCu films with various structures without a need of binder or any conductive additives. By optimizing the evaporation rate of sources materials (Si and Cu in that case), the incident angle and the azimuthal rotation rate of the substrate nanocolumns, chevrons and helices might be deposit directly on the current collector.

In this work, we keep the incident angle and the azimuthal rotation rate as 85^o and 0.02 rpm, respectively. We produce two Si based structured thin films with 10% at. Cu, with different evaporation rates. The quartz crystal microbalances of Cu and Si show 0.4-4.4 Ǻ/s and 0.9-10 Ǻ/s for Samples 1 and 2, during evapoaration. The morphological test results show that the interaction between the evaporation and the azimuthal rotation rates change the structure of the film. Following the morphological and structural characterizations, their potential uses as anodes in lithium ion batteries are evaluated by means of electrochemical tests.