Submonolayer homoepitaxial films growth

In this work we investigate influence of substrate temperature on the surface morphology for substrate coverage below one monolayer. The model of film growth is based on random deposition enriched by limited surface diffusion. Also anisotropy in the growth is involved. We found from computer simulations for simple cubic lattice and solid-on-solid model, that surface morphology changes with increasing temperature from isotropically distributed isolated small islands, through anisotropic 1-D stripes to larger 2-D anisotropic islands and again randomly distributed single atoms. The transition is also marked in height-height correlation function dependence on temperature, as directly seen by snapshots from simulations. The results are in good qualitative agreement in already published results of kinetic Monte Carlo simulations, as well as with experimental results for homoepitaxial growth on Cu(110) substrate. Surface roughness dynamics is also discussed. The surface roughness measured by root-mean-square of surface heights increase with power of film thickness like for initial growth stages of self-affine fractals. For submonolayer coverage the roughness dynamics is similar to one obtained for simple random deposition.