Ion beam irradiation of nanostructures – A 3D Monte Carlo simulation code

A computer code for the simulation of ion beam irradiation of nanostructures has been developed. The code simulates the transport of energetic ions through matter by means of a Monte Carlo algorithm, similar to the often-used TRIM code (Ziegler et al. (1985) [1]). New effects occur compared to bulk, when irradiating nanostructures, which are of the same size as the ion range or the damage cascade. To account for these effects, the target in our code does not consist of layers like in TRIM but can be defined as an arbitrary 3-dimensional structure. This allows to obtain more accurate 3D distributions of implanted ions and implantation damage for nanostructures, which cannot be described by a stack of layers. We demonstrate the functionality of the code by comparing simulations with ion beam implantation into nanowires.