Morphological evolution in ballistic deposition

Abstract

Ballistic deposition model has been employed to simulate the morphological evolution of thin-film growth under non-normal incident flux that occurs frequently in realistic physical vapor deposition. We show that the growth front clearly deviates from the Kardar, Parisi, and Zhang universality class and the growth front exhibits a characteristic length scale that gives rise to a wavelength selection. The implication is that under realistic physical vapor deposition conditions, the growth front morphology is expected not to obey the well-established dynamic scaling hypothesis.