Composition dependent nanocolumn tilting angle during the oblique angle co-deposition

During the oblique angle co-deposition of Si and Cu, the nanoculumn tilting angle beta changes systematically with the relative composition of Si and Cu when the vapor incident angle h is fixed. This result demonstrates that the beta-theta relationship does depend closely on the material property and composition, which is very different from the predictions of the well-known universal models, such as tangent or cosine rules. A statistic model based on the size, spacing, and stacking of Si and Cu atoms has been proposed and the predicted result agrees well with the experimental data. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3676665]