A three-dimensional (3D) energy-dependent kinetic Monte Carlo technique is developed to simulate thin film growth with deposition of energetic atoms. We incorporate the effects of the incident kinetic energy and the incident angle of atomic fluxes into the conventional vapour phase deposition model. The atom reflection, the biased diffusion and the athermal diffusion caused by the incident energy and the incident angle are included in our study. We simulate the film morphology and the surface roughness of homoepitaxial Cu films on a Cu(001) substrate with various incident energies and incident angles. The simulation results show that the energetic atoms can enhance the smoothness of the surface. This effect is very significant at a low substrate temperature or a high deposition rate. For a fixed incident energy, there exists a transition angle where the surface roughness is a minimum. In addition, the surface morphology of the Cu film in sputtering deposition is also studied and the approximate energy and angle distributions of the sputtered atoms are used. The results are in agreement with the experimental results.

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With a self-consistent fluid model, we study the transport characteristics of the collisionless radio frequency (rf) sheath in a high density plasma and calculate the spatiotemporal ion density and the potential drop across the sheath in one rf cycle for an rf-bias frequency of 13.56 MHz. We also study the effects of the rf frequency on the voltage at the electrode, the sheath width, the ion energy distribution (IED) and the ion angular distribution (IAD) at the electrode. The simulated results indicate that the incidence angles of the ions impinging on the electrode are less than 8° when the ion velocity in the direction perpendicular to the sheath field is assumed to be a Boltzmann distribution. It is concluded that the rf frequency plays a crucial role for the energy and angular distributions of ions impinging on the electrode surface, and the IED and IAD are affected by the plasma density and the rf-bias power.

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A kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulation is conducted to study the growth of ultrathin film of Co on Cu(001) surface. The many-body, tight-binding potential model is used in the simulation to represent the interatomic potential. The film morphology of heteroepitaxial Co film on a Cu(001) substrate at the transient and final state conditions with various incident energies is simulated. The Co covered area and the thickness of the film growth of the first two layers are investigated. The simulation results show that the incident energy influences the film growth and structure. There exists a transition energy where the interfacial roughness is minimum. There are some void regions in the film in the final state, because of the influence of the island growth in the first few layers. In addition, there are deviations from ideal layer-by-layer growth at a coverage from 0 ∼ 2 monolayers (ML).