  In the present work, a set of ZrO2 thin films have been deposited at 82
degree angle of deposition at several substrate rotation speeds and at 0
degree. The effect of substrate rotation on optical, structural, morphological
properties and residual stress has been studies thoroughly. Refractive index
estimated from ellipsometric measurement and suitable modeling depicts an
interesting decreasing behavior with substrate rotation and has been explained
in the light of varying columnar structure with substrate rotation. Refractive
index of GLAD ZrO2 films varies between and 1.901 to 2.011. Normally deposited
film exhibits refractive index value of 2.178 which is substantially greater
than that of GLAD films. Lowering in refractive index of glancing angle
deposited films is the attribute of dominant atomic shadowing at glancing
angles. Further, correlation length which is the representative of surface
grain size was obtained from suitable modeling of atomic force microscopy data
and it exhibits a decreasing trend with substrate rotation. The trend has also
been attributed to the varying columnar microstructure with substrate rotation.
All the glancing angle deposited ZrO2 films possess root mean square roughness
between 4.6 and 5.1 nm whereas normally deposited film depicts 1.0 nm rms
roughness. Dominant atomic shadowing is responsible for high roughness of GLAD
films. Both glancing angle and normally deposited films exhibit preferential
growth of monoclinic phase oriented in different directions. GLAD films also
depict a tetragonal peak which has been attributed to the fine nano-crystallite
size (~13 nm). Residual stress depicts a great switching from large compressive
to small tensile as the deposition angle switches from normal to glancing angle
