28 research outputs found
Kinetic Monte Carlo Simulation of Strained Heteroepitaxial Growth with Intermixing
An efficient method for the simulation of strained heteroepitaxial growth
with intermixing using kinetic Monte Carlo is presented. The model used is
based on a solid-on-solid bond counting formulation in which elastic effects
are incorporated using a ball and spring model. While idealized, this model
nevertheless captures many aspects of heteroepitaxial growth, including
nucleation, surface diffusion, and long range effects due elastic interaction.
The algorithm combines a fast evaluation of the elastic displacement field with
an efficient implementation of a rejection-reduced kinetic Monte Carlo based on
using upper bounds for the rates. The former is achieved by using a multigrid
method for global updates of the displacement field and an expanding box method
for local updates. The simulations show the importance of intermixing on the
growth of a strained film. Further the method is used to simulate the growth of
self-assembled stacked quantum dots