Investigation of physical vapor deposition techniques of conformal shell coating for core/shell structures by Monte Carlo simulations

Vertically aligned core/shell nanowire (nanorod) arrays are favorable candidates in many nano-scale devices such as solar cells, detectors, and integrated circuits. The quality of the shell coating around nanowire arrays is as crucial as the quality of the nanowires in device applications. For this reason, we worked on different physical vapor deposition (PVD) techniques and conducted Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the best deposition technique for a conformal shell coating. Our results show that a small angle (≤ 45°) between incoming flux of particles and the substrate surface normal is necessary for PVD techniques with a directional incoming flux (e.g. thermal or e-beam evaporation) for a reasonable conformal coating. On the other hand, PVD techniques with an angular flux distribution (e.g. sputtering) can provide a fairly conformal shell coating around nanowire arrays without a need of small angle deposition. We also studied the shape effect of the arrays on the conformality of the coating and discovered that arrays of the tapered-top nanorods and the pyramids can be coated with a more conformal and thicker coating compared to the coating on the arrays of flat-top nanowires due to their larger openings in between structures. Our results indicate that conventional PVD techniques, which offer low cost and large scale thin film fabrication, can be utilized for highly conformal and uniform shell coating formation in core/shell nanowire device applications.