Molecular dynamics modeling of vapor-phase and very-low-energy ion-beam crystal growth processes

Abstract The development of techniques capable of performing atomicscale computer simulation of realistic materials science problems is a recent phenomenon. Although the initial attempts to utilize such simulation techniques began not long after introduction of the first digital computers, application was mainly limited to highly idealized statistical mechanics problems due to the computational complexity of more realistic problems. Such problems were generally studied in systems consisting of up to several hundred atoms interacting through simple pairwise potentials. These simulations were of great value in fundamental studies of melting and other phase transitions, the structure of simple classical and quantum liquids, and simple diffusion problems.