Molecular dynamics study of monomer and dimer emission processes with high energy gas cluster ion impact

The mechanism of the sputtering process by energetic large cluster ion impacts was studied using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. MD simulations of Ar1000 clusters accelerated with 50 keV total energy impacting on a Si(100) target were performed with 50 trials at different impact points in order to improve the statistical reliance. From these MD simulations, a sputtering yield of about 20 Si atoms/impact was obtained. Si clusters such as Si2, Si3, etc. were also found in the sputtered particles, and the sputtering yields for each cluster size obey the power-decay rule with a decay index of 2.3–3. The investigation of trajectories of sputtered Si1 and Si2 showed that initial coordinates of sputtered particles residing within a region corresponds to a crater-shaped hole caused by cluster impact. As for the sputtering of dimers, it is found that, not only the emission of a preformed dimer (i.e. a pair of target atoms initially bound before the cluster impact), but the emission of dynamically formed dimers through multiple collisions is also probable event for cluster impact.