A model for describing sputtering in the cascade regime for amorphous flat targets is Thompson's analytical model [4]. An algorithm that simulates sputtering based on a quantum mechanical treatment including electrons stripping at high energy is implemented in the program TRIM.[5]

A different mechanism of physical sputtering is heat spike sputtering. This may occur when the solid is dense enough, and the incoming ion heavy enough, that the collisions occur very close to each other. Then the binary collision approximation is no longer valid, but rather the collisional process should be understood as a many-body process. The dense collisions induce a heat spike (= thermal spike), which essentially melts the crystal locally. If the molten zone is close enough to a surface, large amounts of atoms may sputter due to flow of liquid to the surface and/or microexplosions[6]. Heat spike sputtering is most important for heavy ions (say Xe or Au or cluster ions) with energies in the keV