Morphology of Fine-Particle Monolayers Deposited on Nanopatterned Substrates

TL;DR

This paper investigates how regular substrate patterns influence the irreversible adsorption and resulting morphology of nanosized particles, revealing complex behaviors through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized random sequential adsorption model on patterned substrates, exploring the effects of cell size and separation on jammed state properties.

Findings

Rich behavior observed in jammed state morphology

Dependence of particle arrangement on pattern parameters

Efficient Monte Carlo simulations conducted

Abstract

We study the effect of the presence of a regular substrate pattern on the irreversible adsorption of nanosized and colloid particles. Deposition of disks of radius $r_0$ is considered, with the allowed regions for their center attachment at the planar surface consisting of square cells arranged in a square lattice pattern. We study the jammed state properties of a generalized version of the random sequential adsorption model for different values of the cell size, $a$, and cell-cell separation, $b$. The model shows a surprisingly rich behavior in the space of the two dimensionless parameters $\alpha=a/2r_0$ and $\beta=b/2r_0$. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations for system sizes of $500\times500$ square lattice unit cells were performed by utilizing an efficient algorithm, to characterize the jammed state morphology.