Statistical Analysis on the Structural Size of Simulated Thin Film Growth with Molecular Dynamics for Glancing Angle Incidence Deposition
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I read with interested your manuscript, which is well-written and discusses interisting results. I have a few suggestions for improvements:
Line 69-70: It is not clear from this sentence that the comparision with 30x20 nm is in the current manuscript. This of course becomes clear later in the text, but would be good to be clearer already here.
Line 103: I would suggest "low " instead of "small" for the particle energy.
Line 107-1010: Both here and later in the manuscript, it is unclear why the two potentials are not applied on both substrate areas, but the Matsui method only is applied to the smaller area. I suspect this is because of computational constraints or similar, but this should be explained more clearly.
Figure 3 and line 126: If computationally feasible, it would be helpfull to also present an SD for the Zhang method. Hence it is unclear, why the Zhang method was only applied once to the 7x8nm area.
Line 132: At this point it is not clear, why the (higher) Matsui results is more correct than the (lower) Zhang results, just that they are different. In the discussion you specify, that this is in comparision to real world measurements, but it would be good to mention this already here.
Line 183: "significance" is a weird choice of word here, maybe "relevance" instead?
Line 188: It is unclear here that the symbol "\Delta n" indicates birefringence, this could be noted the first time the symbol is used.
Line 219-221: Somethings wrong with the figure references here.
Table 2-3: Three seems like a very low number of simulations to evaluate mean and SD. I suspect this is due to computational reasons, but there should be given an argument for the choice of three.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
Manuscript is focused on the simulation of the nanostructures, which occurs in thermal coating processes. Application of GLAD coatings was discussed in relations to the structural properties for the simulation study.
Results were compared to the experimental data on the density of structures grown and a modification of the potential necessary for simulation applications was discussed. The results of simulations were considered for performing and evaluation of the thin film growth. The analysis was done for SiO2 and TiO2 and revealed, that the chosen interaction potential has a significant impact onto the structural properties (density, roughness and anisotropy).
Results and conclusions were discussed properly and adequate conclusions were provided on the relations between small structures and larger structures growth in relation to GLAD. The manuscript provides more pronounced data on the density for larger structures. The detailed discussion of the lateral structure size characteristic and description in this paper was provided.
Novelty of the manuscript is evident in the surface chemistry and applied methodology of calculations. Novelty and provided data are sufficient for publication in Materials.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The paper investigates different aspects of molecular dynamics simulations of thin film growth. The article is generally well written, however I suggest some minor amendments and supplements:
- In many, many places there is no space between numbers and unit symbols. In Latex “\,” is a non breaking space symbol
- Materials and Methods : Please add a few words about the potentials used. Why these potentials and not more advanced ones such as https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.93.144110 ?
- Materials and Methods : Please provide more details on the simulation methodology: number, length of integration steps, by what method long-range Coulombic interactions are calculated, etc.? https://lammps.sandia.gov/doc/kspace_style.html
- Page 7, “10Fehler! Verweis-219 quelle konnte nicht gefunden werden. and Figure 11Fehler! Verweisquelle konnte 220 nicht gefunden werden ” : ?
- References : I may be wrong, but titles in references are not written in quotation marks
- References, 4…” of SiO2 thin films” : lower index
- References, 11…” Polymorphs of TiO2” : lower index
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
