What promotes derected self assembly (DSA)?

A low-energy electron beam (EB) can create self-interstitial atoms (SIA) in a solid and can cause directed self-assembly (DSA), e.g. {3 1 1}SIA platelets in c-Si. The crystalline structure of this planar defect is known from experiment to be made up of SIAs that form well aligned 〈1 1 0〉 atomic rows on each (3 1 1) plane. To simulate the experiment we distributed Frenkel pairs (FP) randomly in bulk c-Si. Then making use of a molecular dynamic (MD) simulation, we have reproduced the experimental result, where SIAs are trapped at metastable sites in bulk. With increasing pre-doped FP concentration, the number of SIAs that participate in DSA tends to be increased but soon slightly supressed. On the other hand, when the FP concentration is less than 3%, a cooperative motion of target atoms was characterized from the long-range-order (LRO) parameter. Here we investigated the correlation between DSA and that cooperative motion, by adding a case of intrinsic c-Si. We confirmed that the cooperative motion slightly promote DSA by assisting migration of SIAs toward metastable sites as long as the FP concentration is less than 3%, however, it is essentially independent of DSA.