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Published May 1999 | public
Journal Article

Simulation of sputtering induced by high energy gold clusters

Abstract

Recently Andersen et al. reported exceptionally large nonlinear sputtering yields following the bombardment of gold targets with small, high energy gold clusters (H.H. Andersen, A. Brunelle, S. Della-Negra, J. Depauw, Y. LeBeyec, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80 (1998) 5433). Nonlinearities up to ∼1000% were observed for Au_5 clusters with a total energy of 800 keV. We have carried out molecular dynamics simulations on a massively parallel computer to model the Au_n → Au system. The results suggest that both collisional and thermal spike mechanisms contribute to the large nonlinear yields observed by Andersen et al. Our simulations also indicate that sputtering statistics are very important at high cluster bombarding energies. A substantial fraction of the simulated impacts produce no sputtered atoms, while individual sputtering events producing very large numbers of sputtered atoms contribute significantly to the total sputtering yield at high energy.

Additional Information

© 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. Received 6 October 1998: received in revised form 19 January 1999. Supported in part by the National Science Foundation (grants DMR-9312468 and DMR-9712538 at Cal State Fullerton and DMR-9730893 at Caltech).

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023