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 $500\times500$ square lattice unit cells were performed by utilizing an efficient algorithm, to characterize the jammed state morphology.