Abstract
The scaling properties of islands grown during submonolayer thin film deposition have presented a long-standing challenge to theorists. Recently, the capture zone model has been used to obtain a good understanding of the island size distributions for the cases of immobile islands that nucleate above a critical size. What scaling properties exist in other circumstances? I shall discuss two cases: firstly, when monomer evaporation from the substrate is included and, secondly, when the islands have a mobility that is comparable to that of the deposited monomers. With monomer evaporation we find that the island size distributions show approximate scaling with coverage, where the shape of the distribution is indicative of the magnitude of the evaporation rate. In the second case, high island mobility means that a mean-field approach to describing the dynamics is appropriate. Here, there is no scaling of the size distribution, but the variation of the total island density with substrate coverage displays scaling properties that are characteristic of the island mobility. It is thus apparent that different growth processes impact on the island statistics in distinct ways, promising simple diagnostic measures from which experimentalists can determine the dominant growth processes in their systems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Mulheran, P.A., and Blackman, J.A. (1996) Capture zones and scaling in homogeneous thin-film growth, Phys. Rev. B 53, pp. 10261–10267
Jensen, P., Larralde, H. and Pimpinelli, A. (1997) Effect of monomer evaporation on a simple model of submonolayer growth, Phys. Rev. B 55 pp. 2556–2569
Harris, P.J.F. (1995) Growth and structure of supported catalyst particles, Int. Mater. Rev. 40 pp. 97–115
Mulheran, P.A. and Robbie, D.A. (2000) Theory of the island and capture zone size distributions in thin film growth, Euraphys. Lett. 49 pp. 617–623
Blackman, J.A. and Mulheran, P.A. (2001) Growth of clusters on surfaces: Monte Carlo simulations and scaling properties, Comp, Phys. Cornm 137 pp. 195–205.
Mulheran, P.A. and Robbie, D.A. (1998) Power-law island size distributions and the Avrami model, Phil. Mag. Lett. 78 pp. 247–253
Robbie, D.A. and Mulheran, P.A. (2000) Impact of monomer evaporation on the statistics of island arrays formed in thin film deposition simulations, Phil. Mag. B 80 pp.1299–1309
Jensen, P., Barabasi, A.-L., Larralde, H., Havlin, S. and Stanley, H.E. (1994) Deposition, diffusion and aggregation of atoms on surfaces—a model for nanostructure growth, Phys. Rev. B 50 pp. 15316–15329
Bales, G.S. and Chrzan, D.C. (1994) Dynamics of irreversible island growth during submonolayer epitaxy, Phys. Rev. B 50 pp. 6057–6067
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mulheran, P.A. (2002). Island Statistics Reflecting Growth Processes. In: Kotrla, M., Papanicolaou, N.I., Vvedensky, D.D., Wille, L.T. (eds) Atomistic Aspects of Epitaxial Growth. NATO Science Series, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0391-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0391-9_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0675-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0391-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive