Atomistic study of deposition process of Al thin film on Cu substrate

YZ Cao and JJ Zhang and T Sun and YD Yan and FL Yu, APPLIED SURFACE SCIENCE, 256, 5993-5997 (2010).

DOI: 10.1016/j.apsusc.2010.03.107

In this paper we report molecular dynamics based atomistic simulations of deposition process of Al atoms onto Cu substrate and following nanoindentation process on that nanostructured material. Effects of incident energy on the morphology of deposited thin film and mechanical property of this nanostructured material are emphasized. The results reveal that the morphology of growing film is layer-by-layer-like at incident energy of 0.1-10eV. The epitaxy mode of film growth is observed at incident energy below 1eV, but film-mixing mode commences when incident energy increase to 10eV accompanying with increased disorder of film structure, which improves quality of deposited thin film. Following indentation studies indicate deposited thin films pose lower stiffness than single crystal Al due to considerable amount of defects existed in them, but Cu substrate is strengthened by the interface generated from lattice mismatch between deposited Al thin film and Cu substrate. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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