Stencil growth of metallic nanorod: An atomistic simulation

TL;DR

This paper uses molecular dynamics simulations to demonstrate stencil growth of metallic nanorods, showing that nanoscale patterning is achievable with a mask and that nanorods have higher surface area and decreasing roughness over time.

Contribution

It introduces an atomistic simulation approach to model stencil growth of metallic nanorods, highlighting the effects of mask proximity and surface roughness evolution.

Findings

Nanoscale patterns can be achieved using stencil growth in simulations.

Nanorods have higher surface area compared to thin films.

Surface roughness decreases due to merging of irregularities during deposition.

Abstract

We demonstrate the stencil growth of nanoscale patterns using molecular dynamic simulation. A comparison has been made to a film grown by identical conditions without a stencil. It is shown that in the case of nanoscale proximity between mask and substrate, patterns of the same dimension as the mask can be obtained. The results also indicate that the obtained nanorod presents a higher surface area than the corresponding thin film. It is demonstrated that nanorod surface roughness decreases by merging adjacent surface irregularity during the deposition.