Monte Carlo simulation of polycrystalline thin film deposition

A Monte Carlo program for the simulation of the growth of two-dimensional polycrystalline films onto amorphous substrates is proposed. The coordinate of the atoms are quasicontinuous, allowing islands with different orientations to be included in the same sample. Enhanced diffusion along grain boundaries does not need to be modeled ad hoc since, in our model, it is a simple geometrical consequence of grain misorientation. Adsorption sites are partly fixed and partly dynamically generated at run time. The energy barriers are calculated taking into account the environment of the diffusing atoms. Island and grain size distributions estimated over samples obtained with simulated depositions performed at various substrate temperature are reported. The effect of the substrate temperature on the average grain size in films with coverages from 0.2 to 1 have been simulated and compared with the experimental data available in the literature.