Composition dependent nanocolumn tilting angle during the oblique angle co-deposition

During the oblique angle co-deposition of Si and Cu, the nanoculumn tilting angle β changes systematically with the relative composition of Si and Cu when the vapor incident angle θ is fixed. This result demonstrates that the β-θ relationship does depend closely on the material property and composition, which is very different from the predictions of the well-known “universal” models, such as tangent or cosine rules. A statistic model based on the size, spacing, and stacking of Si and Cu atoms has been proposed and the predicted result agrees well with the experimental data.