When a Surface Becomes a Network: SEM Reveals Hidden Scaling Laws and a Percolation-like Transition in Thin Films

The morphology of solid surfaces encodes fundamental information about the physical mechanisms that govern their formation. Here, we reinterpret scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs of oxide thin films as two-dimensional self-affine morphology fields (not height-metrology) and analyze them using a multiscale statistical-physics framework that integrates spectral, multifractal, geometric, and topological descriptors. Fourier-based power spectral density (PSD) provides the spectral slope <!-- MathType@Translator@5@5@MathML2 (no namespace).tdl@MathML 2.0 (no namespace)@ -->