Pulsed-laser deposition of polycrystalline Ni films: A three-dimensional kinetic Monte Carlo simulation

A three-dimensional (3D) kinetic Monte Carlo simulation was performed for the growth of polycrystalline Ni films on a Ni(1 0 0) substrate via pulsed-laser deposition (PLD) on the basis of the deposition of the incident atoms that nucleate randomly and the adatoms surface diffusion combining with a growth restriction within identically oriented grains. The simulations showed that the grains grow rapidly in PLD until they reach the critical grain size that is about 7 monolayer (ML) for the substrate temperature of T = 300 K, and then grow slowly with the time span of the simulations. Moreover, we compared PLD with molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), and found that PLD is characteristically different from MBE at the beginning of the deposition under the condition of the same deposition rate in both cases. However, the differences became not obvious as time unfolds and growth proceeds later.