The effects of substrate rotation on the surface morphology in oblique-incidence metal(100) epitaxial growth are studied via kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of a simplified model, and compared with previous results obtained without rotation. In general, we find that substrate rotation leads to two main effects. At high deposition angles with respect to the substrate normal, rotation leads to a significant change in the surface morphology. In particular, it leads to isotropic mounds and pyramids with (111) facets rather than the anisotropic ripples and rods observed in the absence of rotation. Due to the existence of rapid transport on these facets, the lateral feature size increases approximately linearly with film thickness. Due to the fact that substrate rotation tends to reduce the effects of shadowing, the surface roughness is also decreased compared to the roughness in the absence of rotation. While this leads to a moderate reduction in the roughness for the case of ballistic deposition, the effect is significantly larger in the case of deposition with attraction. In the case of ballistic deposition, we also find that the surface roughness increases with rotation rate $\Omega$ for $\Omega <1$ rev/monolayer (ML) before saturating at larger rotation rates ($\Omega >1$ rev/ML). In contrast, for the case of attraction the surface roughness exhibits a negligible dependence on rotation rate for finite rotation rate.

• Received 2 March 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.79.051604