Shadowing effects on the microstructure of obliquely deposited films

Two spatial dimension front tracking simulations have been performed to study the growth of polycrystalline, faceted films from randomly oriented nuclei by varying the deposition angle of the incident flux during physical vapor deposition. The orientation of grain columns, the porosity, the crystallographic texture, and grain size are sensitive to the deposition angle. The origin of this effect is widely believed to be associated with shadowing. In order to isolate the effects of shadowing from other physical effects (such as surface diffusion, deposition species size, flux divergence, etc.), we have constructed a simulation where all of these effects are completely removed. These simulations demonstrate that while many of the observed structural properties of obliquely deposited films are controlled by shadowing, a few key properties cannot be attributed solely to shadowing.