The effect of incident energy, incident angle and substrate temperature on surface morphology and atomic distribution of NiTi films

Molecular dynamics simulation is employed to study the formation of NiTi thin films on Ni (001) substrates simultaneously deposited with Ni and Ti atoms in this work. The effects of different deposition parameters on surface morphology and atomic distribution of deposited NiTi films are investigated. The deposition parameters mainly include incident energy, incident angle and substrate temperature. The simulation results indicate that incident energy and substrate temperature have a significant effect on the surface roughness of deposited NiTi film. However, incident angles below 30° have little influence on surface roughness of NiTi film. The simulation results show that increasing substrate temperature and incident energy can enhance the intermixing between substrate and film. The content of Ni on the NiTi film surface increase significantly with the raise of incident energy. The defect analysis of the deposited film demonstrates that incident angle mainly affects the number of voids and vacancies in the film. For film samples of different deposition conditions, the films deposited at larger incident angles contain more voids and vacancies. While the films deposited at higher substrate temperatures contain fewer voids and vacancies.