Effects of different incidence rates of carbon and silicon clusters on the surface properties of SiC films

The crystal quality of silicon-carbide (SiC) films plays a very important role in experimental and device production, but there is little research on the deposition and annealing process at the atomic scale. Using molecular dynamics, we simulated the deposition of crystalline Si, C clusters on a rough-surfaced Si substrate followed by annealing and investigated the effect of incidence rate on film surface morphology, crystallization rate, surface roughness, incident atom distribution, density, and vacancies. The results showed that the surfaces became smoother with increasing incidence rate both before and after deposition, but the difference in surface roughness between film groups with different incidence rates decreased after annealing. After annealing, the film density increased with increasing cluster incidence rate, while the volume fraction of the vacancies and cavities simultaneously increased. The higher the cluster incidence rate during deposition, the deeper the distribution of incident atoms, and the more the mixing with substrate atoms. An interesting phenomenon was observed during the high-temperature relaxation phase of the annealing, when the crystallization rate increased, stabilized, and then decreased as the relaxation proceeded. This study is of great significance to better understanding the nanoscale annealing of thin film deposits and guiding SiC thin film generation experiments.