Molecular Dynamics simulation of Ni thin film growth on Cu (001) substrate

Molecular dynamics simulations have been carried out to study the heteroepitaxial growth of Ni thin film deposited on Cu (001) surface at the atomic scale. The results reveal that the growth mode of Ni thin film changes from island growth mode to layer-by-layer growth mode as the substrate temperature and incident energy increase. In addition, Ni atoms hardly penetrate into Cu substrate while Cu atoms easily diffuse into Ni deposition layers. The thickness of intermixing region depends on the incident energy and higher incident energy results in greater thicknesses. Specially, regardless of how much the incident energy is, the incremental value of the incident energy is about 1.6 eV due to local acceleration. Finally, the peaks of Radial Distribution Function (RDF) clearly indicate that the structure of Ni thin film tends to be amorphous as substrate temperature increases.