Eur. Phys. J. D 23, 369-373 (2003)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2003-00090-0

Structure character in small-carbon-cluster deposition on diamond surface

¹ Institute of modern physics, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, P.R. China
² Ion beam laboratory, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese academy of sciences, Shanghai 200050, P.R. China
³ North-West Institute of Nuclear Technology, Xian 710024, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a zypan@fudan.ac.cn

Received: 5 July 2002
Revised: 16 January 2003
Published online: 29 April 2003

Abstract

Experimentally, hydrogen-free diamond-like carbon (DLC) films were assembled by means of pulsed laser deposition (PLD), where energetic small-carbon-clusters were deposited on the substrate. In this paper, the chemisorption of energetic C₂ and C₁₀ clusters on diamond (001)-() surface was investigated by molecular dynamics simulation. The influence of cluster size and the impact energy on the structure character of the deposited clusters is mainly addressed. The impact energy was varied from a few tens eV to 100 eV. The chemisorption of C₁₀ was found to occur only when its incident energy is above a threshold value (E_th). While, the C₂ cluster was easily to adsorb on the surface even at much lower incident energy. With increasing the impact energy, the structures of the deposited C₂ and C₁₀ are different from the free clusters. Finally, the growth of films synthesized by energetic C₂ and C₁₀ clusters were simulated. The statistics indicate the C₂ cluster has high probability of adsorption and films assembled of C₂ present slightly higher SP³ fraction than that of C₁₀-films, especially at higher impact energy and lower substrate temperature. Our result supports the experimental findings. Moreover, the simulation underlines the deposition mechanism at atomic scale.