Improving the understanding of ion-beam-induced defect formation and evolution by atomistic computer simulations

The morphology of the as-implanted damage in silicon is investigated using a recently developed combination of time-ordered computer simulations based on the binary collision approximation (BCA) with classical molecular dynamics (MD) calculations. The method is applied to determine the type and the amount of defects formed within the first nanosecond after ion impact. The depth profile and the total number of different defect species (vacancies, interstitials, disordered atoms, etc.) produced on average per incident ion are calculated for B+ (15 keV), P+ (5, 10, 20, 30 keV), and As+ (15 keV) implantations. It is shown that the as-implanted defect structure depends not only on the nuclear energy deposition per ion but also explicitly on the ion mass. Therefore for each ion species the damage morphology exhibits characteristic features. For heavy ions the percentage of extended defects is higher than for light ions. In all cases investigated the number of free or isolated interstitials exceeds the amount of free vacancies. The results obtained allow a microscopic interpretation of the phenomenological model for the as-implanted damage employed in conventional BCA simulations in order to describe the dose dependence of the shape of ion range profiles. They can be also applied to get more realistic initial conditions for the simulation of the defect kinetics during post-implantation annealing.