Molecular dynamics simulation of nano-scale Fe–Al thin film growth

The interfacial features and the growth morphology of the Fe–Al metallic bilayer system were quantitatively investigated using molecular dynamics simulation. The Fe on Al (001) system has shown intermixing and formation of an intermetallic compound. However, characteristics such as layer coverage function and mixing length were observed to differ from other ferromagnetic/non-ferromagnetic metallic bilayer systems. The different intermixing behavior could be successfully explained in terms of cohesive energy, lattice matching, and local acceleration effect. It can be clearly seen that the intermixing was rather insensitive to the change of the initial kinetic energy of adatoms, but largely dependent on the substrate temperature and orientation of the Al substrate.