Temperature-induced chaos during nanorod growth by physical vapor deposition

Atomic shadowing during kinetically limited physical vapor deposition causes a chaotic instability in the layer morphology that leads to nanorod growth. Glancing angle deposition GLAD experiments indicate that the rod morphology, in turn, exhibits a chaotic instability with increasing surface diffusion. The measured rod width versus growth temperature converges onto a single curve for all metals when normalized by the melting point Tm. A model based on mean field nucleation theory reveals a transition from a twoto three-dimensional growth regime at 0.20 0.03 Tm and an activation energy for diffusion on curved surfaces of 2.46 0.02 kTm. The consistency in the GLAD data suggests that the effective mass transport on a curved surface is described by a single normalized activation energy that is applicable to all elemental metals. © 2009 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.3116720