ABSTRACT
Thin-film growth by physical vapor deposition (PVD) and surface erosion by ion beam sputtering (IBS) are crucial techniques for numerous process steps in nanotechnology, for example, in microelectronic device fabrication, data storage, or chemical sensing. Many of these surfaces exhibit spatial and temporal fluctuations that follow certain scaling relations similar to those observed in equilibrium critical phenomena and can be analyzed by means of fractal geometry. Complementary to atomistic simulations of growth and erosion based on kinetic Monte-Carlo (kMC) methods or molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, continuum equations are able to cover a much larger spatial and temporal scale accessing the macroscopic scales at which nontrivial features of the morphological dynamics occur, that remain out of reach for atomistic approaches. The MATLAB program package "Ripples and Dots" is designed to solve various linear and nonlinear continuum equations of surface growth and erosion in various dimensions.
