Model to estimate fractal dimension for ion-bombarded materials

Abstract

Comprehensive fractal Monte Carlo model ITMC-F (Hu and Hassanein, 2012 [1]) is developed based on the Monte Carlo ion bombardment simulation code, i.e., Ion Transport in Materials and Compounds (ITMC) code (Hassanein, 1985 [2]). The ITMC-F studies the impact of surface roughness on the angular dependence of sputtering yield. Instead of assuming material surfaces to be flat or composed of exact self-similar fractals in simulation, we developed a new method to describe the surface shapes. Random fractal surfaces which are generated by midpoint displacement algorithm and support vector machine algorithm are combined with ITMC. With this new fractal version of ITMC-F, we successfully simulated the angular dependence of sputtering yield for various ion-target combinations, with the input surface roughness exponent directly depicted from experimental data (Hu and Hassanein, 2012 [1]). The ITMC-F code showed good agreement with the experimental data. In advanced, we compare other experimental sputtering yield with the results from ITMC-F to estimate the surface roughness exponent for ion-bombarded material in this research.