Submonolayer growth in the presence of defect sites

Submonolayer epitaxy in the presence of defect sites on the substrate is studied by means of a level-set method. Here, island nucleations occur by the creation of dimers and defect-monomer pairs. We present results for the scaled island size distribution (ISD) for growth with different densities for both random and regularly positioned defects. The dynamics show that for large D/F and defect density, all islands are nucleated at the defect sites in the very early stages of growth. We use scaling ideas to show that a gamma distribution can suitably describe the ISD. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.