Abstract
Glass films created by vapor-depositing molecules onto a substrate can exhibit properties similar to those of ordinary glasses aged for thousands of years. It is believed that enhanced surface mobility is the mechanism that allows vapor deposition to create such exceptional glasses, but it is unclear how this effect is related to the final state of the film. Here we use molecular dynamics simulations to model vapor deposition and an efficient MonteCarlo algorithm to determine the deposition rate needed to create ultrastable glassy films. We obtain a scaling relation that quantitatively captures the efficiency gain of vapor deposition over bulk annealing, and demonstrates that surface relaxation plays the same role in the formation of vapor-deposited glasses as bulk relaxation does in ordinary glass formation.
Highlights
Glass films created by vapor-depositing molecules onto a substrate can exhibit properties similar to those of ordinary glasses aged for thousands of years
It is believed that enhanced surface mobility is the mechanism that allows vapor deposition to create such exceptional glasses, but it is unclear how this effect is related to the final state of the film
While simulations and experiments have shown that vapor-deposited glasses may lie lower in the potential energy landscape than liquidcooled glasses [3, 11,12,13,14,15,16], and sometimes have the same structure as glasses of a comparable energy [14], it is not known whether vapor deposition can provide truly equilibrium configurations, especially below Tg
Summary
Glass films created by vapor-depositing molecules onto a substrate can exhibit properties similar to those of ordinary glasses aged for thousands of years. We use molecular dynamics simulations to model vapor deposition and an efficient Monte Carlo algorithm to determine the deposition rate needed to create ultra-stable glassy films.
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