Control of surface roughness in amorphous thin-film growth

摘要

The growth of optical layers of SiO_(2) and Nb_(2)O_(5) on amorphous substrates is investigated. We develop a kinetic Monte Carlo model which mimics the amorphous structure by randomly fluctuating binding energies. The resulting surface profiles are characterized by their root-mean-square roughness, height-height correlation functions, and growth exponents. For strong random fluctuations, the growth exponents exceed the value of 0.5, in good agreement with experiment.