Broadening of Cr nanostructures in laser-focused atomic deposition

This paper presents the experimental progress of laser-focused Cr atomic deposition and the experimental condition. The result is an accurate array of lines with a periodicity of 212.8±0.2 nm and mean full-width at half maximum as approximately 95 nm. Surface growth in laser-focused Cr atomic deposition is modeled and studied by kinetic Monte Carlo simulation including two events: the one is that atom trajectories in laser standing wave are simulated with the semiclassical equations of motion to obtain the deposition position; the other is that adatom diffuses by considering two major diffusion processes, namely, terrace diffusion and step-edge descending. Comparing with experimental results (Anderson W R, Bradley C C, McClelland J J and Celotta R J 1999 Phys. Rev. A59 2476), it finds that the simulated trend of dependence on feature width is in agreement with the power of standing wave, the other two simulated trends are the same in the initial stage. These results demonstrate that some surface diffusion processes play important role in feature width broadening. Numerical result also shows that high incoming beam flux of atoms deposited redounds to decrease the distance between adatoms which can diffuse to minimize the feature width and enhance the contrast.