Modeling of laser annealing

Processes inducing micro- and nano-structural modifications of materials play a crucial role in the advanced technology. In particular, laser irradiation attracts a great interest as a tool for the localized thermal treatment (laser thermal annealing) when the global heating of the sample could be detrimental. With the expansion of the application fields, a research effort is required to understand the kinetics in systems subjected to extreme transient excitations induced by the interaction with the laser light. Modeling and simulations cover a relevant part of this research effort. In this paper we review the current status of the laser annealing modeling. The theoretical analysis will be restricted to the heating stage of the irradiation, i.e. the ultrafast energy transfer from the electronic states to the lattice vibrations will not be considered. Therefore, the timescale of the process must be larger than ~1 ns. Models, numerical methods and applications to the experiments will be presented to deal with different questions. Among them: the simulation of the thermal field when the heat absorption depends consistently on the temperature, the prediction of a phase change kinetics in a melting process including the redistribution of alloyed systems, the damage evolution in the transient non-uniform thermal field promoted by the irradiation induced kinetics, the related dopant activation kinetics. Numerical techniques include: continuum, kinetic Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics approaches.