Critical conditions of epitaxy, mixing and sputtering growth on Cu(1 0 0) surface using molecular dynamics

Molecular dynamics is employed to investigate the film growth process and the sputtering process at different deposition conditions of incident energy, substrate temperature, incident angle, and deposition rate. Tight-binding-second-momentum-approach (TB-SMA) many-body potential is used to model the interaction. Instead of sputtering yield, an accumulation ratio that is defined as the ratio of the number of the accumulated atoms of the substrate to the total number of the incident atoms and substrate atoms is used. The results indicate that when the deposition rate is 5 atom/ps, the epitaxy mode of film growth and film mixing mode are observed at the incident energy of 0.3–5 eV. When the incident energy is larger than 10 eV, the sputtering phenomenon is significant. As the deposition rate is decreased to 2.5 atom/ps, the sputtering phenomenon is clear only if the incident energy is larger than 20 eV. Furthermore, both the substrate temperature and the incident angle seem to have little effect on the accumulation ratio as the epitaxy mode of film growth and the mode of film mixing is concerned. However, one could have better sputtering process by using high substrate temperature and/or high incident angle.