Kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of deposition of energetic copper atoms on a Cu(001) substrate

Abstract

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.

Preferred Orientation in Sputtered TiO2 Thin Films and Its Effect on the Photo-Oxidation of Acetaldehyde

“…Ellipsometry shows the roughness of the sample decreases with increasing magnitude of the RF bias and is generally larger for low oxygen partial pressure (Table ). This is attributed to increased adparticle diffusion at higher biases and formation of denser, smoother films …”

“…This is attributed to increased adparticle diffusion at higher biases and formation of denser, smoother films. 42 Ib. Preferred Orientation.…”

Effect of Reactive Sputtering Parameters on TiAlN Nanocoating Structure and Morphology

“…When the kinetic energy of incident particles was low the columnar morphology of nanocoating surface were separated by voids resulting a rough surface due to less ability of particles to move onto the surface [18]. However, the energy also was affected by scattering process.…”

Transitions between epitaxial growth regimes: A (1+1)-dimensional kinetic Monte Carlo study

“…There has been a substantial amount of effort focused on the study of submonolayer deposition, island formation and growth, and island-island coalescence [5,18,19,20,21,22], while for multilayer growth several questions remain open [23,24,25,26,27]. Typically, either a detailed approach is considered, which attempts to make no assumptions, or as few as possible [9,28,29,30,31,32,33], or simple models are developed, where mechanisms are restricted to the most relevant ones [34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41]. In this work, we adopt the latter approach, which allows us to better understand the relevance of each process.…”