Modelling Pulsed Deposition of Nanoparticles into films

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerical tool to simulate pulsed nanoparticle deposition, analyzing how particle size and heterogeneity influence film morphology, porosity, and roughness, with findings showing size-dependent porosity growth.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel numerical simulation method for pulsed nanoparticle deposition, exploring effects of particle size and heterogeneity on film properties.

Findings

Porosity increases following a power law with decreasing nanoparticle size.

Heterogeneous and homogeneous samples show different morphological effects.

Porosity and roughness are significantly affected by nanoparticle size and distribution.

Abstract

We propose a numerical tool to mimic the pulsed deposition of nanoparticles, a technique used to fabricate thin films from the deposition of nanoparticles upon a substrate. We employ such tool under different initial conditions, in particular exploring the effect of depositing an heterogeneous/homogenenous sample of nanoparticles in terms of their morphology (size and shape). We monitor how changing the nature of the building block affects the porosity and roughness of the grown nanofilms. We found a strong dependence on the size of the nanoparticles, following, in the low size regime, a growth of the porosity following a power law.