Surface properties of film deposition using molecular dynamics simulation

The morphology of growing film by the sputtering process is studied with molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. We focus on the roughness and layer coverage for diverse deposition process parameters including substrate temperature, deposition rate, incident energy and incident angle. This paper presents the effect of different substrate sizes. The results of simulation show smaller roughness and better layer coverage at low substrate temperature of 500 K and high incident energy of 10–15 eV. The film–substrate system becomes rapidly stabilized at the end of deposition. Our simulation shows that thin films can also grow with two-dimensional layer-by-layer-like way for larger size of substrate at room temperature. These simulated results are consistent with both earlier MD simulations and experimental observation.