Goals:

Develop a Facet Growth Visualization tool to be used as:

1. A design tool to predict the structure of deposited and/or electroplated thin films. 

2. An instruction tool for visual understanding of thin film growth. 

3. A research tool providing input data for other simulation purposes. 

Participants:

Methods: 

We have developed a visualization tool for the two-dimensional nucleation and evolution of polycrystalline thin films, based on the concept of describing the crystal structure in terms of facets, like (100), (111) and (110).   The code allows for the initial location, size, and orientation of the nuclei to be randomly or manually selected.  Crystallographically appropriate facets are created, then grow and interact with each other.  The rate of diffusion between facets are determined from previous Kinetic Lattice Monte Carlo (KLMC) simulations.  Dynamic facet, grain boundary and node arrays are created to visualize the multigrain growth and interaction. The program is intended for use under Windows NT/95/98/2000, and has a graphical user interface, click and go!  The code was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic.

Results, Publications and Presentations:

An image of the user interface including a sample film profile can be found below:

Acknowledgements (funding and computational resources):