Effect of size dependent strain at various coverage on island formation: Kinetic Monte Carlo study

TL;DR

This study uses Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how size-dependent strain influences island formation during molecular beam epitaxy, revealing improved spatial ordering and size distribution of islands.

Contribution

It introduces a model incorporating size-dependent strain-driven detachment to better understand island morphology during MBE growth.

Findings

Strain affects island morphology and density.

Varying strain improves island spatial ordering.

Size distribution of islands is influenced by strain-driven detachment.

Abstract

Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) is an epitaxy method for thin film deposition of single crystals. MBE is widely used in the manufacture of semiconductor devices, including transistors, and it is considered one of the fundamental tools for the development of the nanotechnologies. We have used Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation technique to study the crystal growth during Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). KMC is used to simulate the physical phenomena in which the probable events are selected by using pseudo random numbers. In this work, we have studied the effect of strain at various fixed coverage values, with the model which includes varying strain-driven detachment on average island morphology, average island density, relative width distribution and island size distributions. Our simulation results demonstrate that growth on a patterned impurity surface with inclusion of varying strain-driven detachment resulted in improvement the spatial ordering on island morphologies and the size distribution of the islands.