Simulation of epitaxial growth on convex substrate using phase field crystal method

Abstract

Phase field crystal (PFC) model is employed to simulate the process of growth of epitaxial layer on plane-convex substrate with a lattice mismatch and a small inclination angle. The variation of the systematic free energy, the total atomic number of the epitaxial layer, and the effect of the curvature and the angle of the substrate are analyzed. The results show that when the surface of the substrate is plane, the free energy increases with the increase of the substrate inclination angle, and also the total atomic number of the epitaxial layer increases; while the surface of the substrate is convex, the free energy decreases with the increase of substrate angle and so also the total atomic number of the epitaxial layer decrease. This is the reason that the frontier of surface of epitaxial layer changes from the step bunching to the hill-and-valley facet structure with the increasing of the inclination angle of convex substrate. These results are in good agreement with the other method results.

Keywords

heteroepitaxy / phase field crystal (PFC) / convex substrate / atomic number

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51161003), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi Province (Grant No. 2012GXNSFDA053001) and Ministry-Province jointly-constructed cultivation base for State Key Laboratory of Processing for non-ferrous metal and featured materials, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Grant No. GXKFJ12-01).

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg