A refined Ehrlich–Schwoebel effect on the modification of Si surface nanostructures by post ion milling

✍ Scribed by Jing Zhou; Wen-bin Fan; Wen-bin Chen; You-yuan Zhao; Ming Lu

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 719 KB
• Volume: 254
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0169-4332
• DOI: 10.1016/j.apsusc.2007.09.009

✦ Synopsis

A modeling work has been conducted on a phenomenon called post ion milling (PIM), a post-treatment of Ar + ion sputtering to modify nanostructures on solid surface. It was found by experiments that for PIM with a sufficiently low ion flux, both the average dot size and the surface roughness of Si nanodot arrays on Si(1 0 0) decline steadily against milling time. However, the usually adopted Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) model involving the Bradley-Harper (BH) theory failed to explain the experimental results, nor the KS model that combines both the BH and Ehrlich-Schwoebel (ES) effects. We reexamined the ES term in the KS equation, and derived new terms reflecting the ES contribution. With such a modification, the KS model involving both the BH and the refined ES effects finally gave a qualitative explanation to the PIM result.