Evaluation of energy expenditure in sputtering of atoms from crystal surface. I. Computer modeling by the molecular dynamics method

The molecular dynamics method has been used to study the characteristics of the effect discovered earlier which consists in that an atom emitted from a surface loses energy not only to overcome the forces attracting it to the surface, but also, to a considerable degree, for the recoil of the surrounding atoms. It is shown that analytical models of sputtering do not provide a correct picture of the total energy consumption in sputtering of atoms from the surface, which leads to wrong formulas for the distribution function of sputtered atoms with respect to the kinetic energy and the polar angle.