Numerical analysis of the quantum dots on off-normal incidence ion sputtered surfaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates how substrate rotation affects surface pattern formation during ion beam sputtering, revealing consistent power-law scaling of dot features regardless of rotation in a 2+1D model.

Contribution

It introduces substrate rotation into a 2+1D solid-on-solid model and analyzes its impact on surface topography during ion sputtering.

Findings

Substrate rotation does not alter the power-law scaling exponents of surface dots.

The model shows similar surface pattern characteristics with and without rotation.

Numerical simulations confirm consistent scaling behavior across different ion-material combinations.

Abstract

We implement substrate rotation in a 2+1 dimensional solid-on-solid model of ion beam sputtering of solid surfaces. With this extension of the model, we study the effect of concurrent rotation, as the surface is sputtered, on possible topographic regions of surface patterns. In particular we perform a detailed numerical analysis of the time evolution of dots obtained from our Monte Carlo simulations at off-normal-incidence sputter erosion. We found the same power-law scaling exponents of the dot characteristics for two different sets of ion-material combinations, without and with substrate rotation.