A kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of area selective nucleation of deposited organic molecules on template-induced surface

Abstract

In this paper, a series of kinetic Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to get deeper insight into the microscopic mechanisms of patterning organic particles on templated surfaces. And the selection of nucleation mechanisms for organic particles on templated surface is systematically studied. The simulation results show that organic particle-organic particle interaction plays a key role in the selection of nucleation mechanisms, and the nucleation control efficiency and the final deposited morphology can be directly controlled by the organic molecular interaction. With variation of particle-particle interaction, the full nucleation control region is obtained and can be clearly divided into three regions due to the different nucleation mechanism, i.e. step-edge induced area selective growth, area selective nucleation on top of patterns and template-induced area selective growth. For different nucleation mechanism, the temporal evolution of nucleation morphology on templated surface is also analyzed. The number of deposited molecules shows a great impact on the control of nucleation morphology. The nucleation mechanism for the three regions can be changed with the increasing of deposited molecules.