J. Sillanpaa et I. Koponen, ISLAND GROWTH IN ION-BEAM-ASSISTED METAL-ON-METAL DEPOSITION MODELED BY RATE-EQUATIONS, Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section B, Beam interactions with materials and atoms, 142(1-2), 1998, pp. 67-76
Island growth in ion beam assisted deposition (IBAD) is modelled by ra
te equations, where deposition, diffusion driven aggregation, defect a
nd target adatom production and island fragmentation are taken into ac
count. It is shown that compared with results obtained for a thermal d
eposition, deposition with ion bombardment induced island fragmentatio
n causes the total island density to increase and average island size
to decrease. The observed behaviour is in qualitative agreement with e
xperimental findings. It is demonstrated how the appropriately scaled
island size distributions depend crucially on the fragmentation proces
s, but remain relatively unaffected by diffusion. Possibilities to use
scaled distributions in recognizing experimentally the relative impor
tance of different processes in IBAD are pointed out. (C) 1998 Elsevie
r Science B.V. All rights reserved.