Large-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Interstitial Defect Diffusion in Silicon

Abstract

AbstractThe simulation of defect dynamics and evolution is a technologicaly relevant challenge for computational materials science. The diffusion of small defects in silicon unfolds as a sequence of structural transitions. The relative infrequency of transition events requires simulation over extremely long time scales. We simulate the diffusion of small interstitial clusters (I1, I2, I3) for a range of temperatures using large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with a realistic tight-binding potential. A total of 0.25 μ sec of simulation time is accumulated for the study. A novel real-time multiresolution analysis (RTMRA) technique extracts stable structures directly from the dynamics without structural relaxation. The discovered structures are relaxed to confirm their stability.