Self-Sputtering of the Lennard-Jones Crystal

TL;DR

This paper presents a universal self-sputtering yield curve for a Lennard-Jones fcc crystal surface, serving as a fundamental reference, and compares it with experimental data for metals, highlighting its limitations at high energies.

Contribution

It introduces a universal self-sputtering yield curve for LJ crystals and compares it with experimental metal data, providing fundamental reference information.

Findings

Yield depends only on normalized incident energy

Universal curve is independent of LJ parameters

Good agreement with metals at low energies

Abstract

The self-sputtering yield of the (100) face-centered cubic (fcc) crystal surface consisting of particles interacting with the Lennard-Jones (LJ) potential is presented as a function of the normalized incident particle kinetic energy for normal incidence. Because the self-sputtering yield depends only on the normalized incident energy, the yield curve presented here is the universal curve, independent of the Lennard-Jones parameters, and therefore serves as the fundamental reference data for the LJ system. The self-sputtering yield data are also compared with experimentally obtained self-sputtering yields of some metals, which shows reasonable agreement at relatively low ion incident energy where mostly deposition occurs. At higher ion energy, the self-sputtering of such an LJ material does not represent those of real solids. This is because the repulsive interactions of the LJ potential do not represent those of actual atoms at short distances. The angle dependence of the self-sputtering yield is also presented for some selected normalized energies.