A Monte Carlo Simulation Study of Substrate Effect on AB TypeThin Film Growth

TL;DR

This study employs Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how substrate effects influence the growth and surface roughness of AB type thin films during PVD processes, considering atomic interactions and temperature effects.

Contribution

It introduces an iterative Monte Carlo algorithm to model AB thin film growth on substrates with fixed crystal structures, incorporating inter-atomic interactions and temperature effects.

Findings

Surface roughness depends on substrate structure and temperature.

The model accurately predicts film crystallinity and surface morphology.

Inter-atomic interactions significantly influence film growth patterns.

Abstract

An iterative algorithm based on Monte Carlo method is used to model thin film growth of AB type molecule and crystallization. Primarly, PVD technique is investigated since it is one of the most preferred on thin film growth processes. The formation of thin film has been simulated for a cubic region with 10000 A type and 10000 B type atoms. Up to third nearest neighboring cells have been taken into account to realize the inter-atomic interactions. Boltzmann statistics is used to deal temperature effect by treating both A and B atoms as classical particles. The proposed substrate with the same crystal structure of the film was simulated by fixing the first layer of the film as having a perfect crystal structure. Roughness of the film surface is analyzed by sampling the RMS (Root mean square roughness) parameter both analytically and visually.