Morphology of fine-particle monolayers deposited on nanopatterned substrates

Abstract

We study the effect of the presence of a regular substrate pattern on the irreversible adsorption of nanosized and colloid particles. Deposition of disks of radius r(0) is considered, with the allowed regions for their center attachment at the planar surface consisting of square cells arranged in a square lattice pattern. We study the jammed state properties of a generalized version of the random sequential adsorption model for different values of the cell size, a , and cell-cell separation, b . The model shows a surprisingly rich behavior in the space of the two dimensionless parameters alpha = a / 2r(0) and beta = b / 2r(0) . Extensive Monte Carlo simulations for system sizes of 500 x 500 square lattice unit cells were performed by utilizing an efficient algorithm, to characterize the jammed state morphology.