Molecular dynamics study of damage generation mechanisms in silicon at the low energy regime

Abstract

We have used classical molecular dynamics simulations to study the damage generation mechanisms in silicon for energy transfers below the atomic displacement energy. These low energy interactions, usually ignored in binary collision based models, establish the difference in damage morphology for different ions. Our work is focused on determining the conditions under which amorphous pockets are formed using a molecular dynamics simulation scheme. We have incorporated the effect of low energy interactions in a binary collision model using our simulation results. This improved model is able to reproduce the damage structures obtained with molecular dynamics but with a much lower computational cost.