Code1: MBE_Growth_Simulation_Code
Introduction
Visualizing growth morphology in molecular beam expitaxy (MBE) can help students grasp ideas in class. In addition, if a code works well for different compounds by tuning parameters, it may find academic/commercial applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, there was no publicly available code for visualizing MBE growth. For this reason, Wei Li and I developed this code as the final project in the course MSEG860. The code is based on an obsolete code, KMCInterative, written by Michael Grundmann at UCSB. We first wrote it in Python/Cython. We did not expect the low speed of the code, and we then rewrote it in C++. You may find the chart on right which compares the speed.
The features of this code are summaries as follows:
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Two threads design: one for 3D rending and the other for Monte-Carlo calculations.
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Helpful thread control which allows users to pause, resume, and restart the calculations.
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More than 40 input/output functions enabling easy control of the code
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Portable i.e. no installation needed and available for both Windows and MacOS
Visualization
Using the code, visualizing different growth morphologies is convenient. As shown in the below images, if we fix the energies and flux, by adjusting temperature, we can observe statistics roughness, islanding, and step-flow growth which in good agreement with experimental observation.
Download and Usage
Downloads: Please visit my Github repositories
To run the code, you may download the releases. For Windows version, it contains an executive file and libraries. The MacOS version is a dmg file.
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If you want to check the source files, please download the MBEcodeSourceFiles.zip
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