Kinetics of Submonolayer Epitaxial Growth

Molecular beam epitaxy is an important method for growing thinlms and nanostructures. One of the scienti c challenges is to understand the fundamental processes that control the evolution of thin lm structure and morphology. The results of kinetic Monte Carlo simulations carried out to study the dependence of the submonolayer scaled island-size distribution on the critical island-size are presented and compared with experiments. A recently developed method which involves a self-consistent coupling of evolution equations for the capture-zone distributions with rate-equations for the island-size distribution is also described. Our method explicitly takes into account the existence of a denuded (\capture") zone around every island and the correlations between the size of an island and the corresponding average capture zone, and has been used to develop a quantitative rate-equation approach to irreversible submonolayer growth on a two-dimensional substrate. The resulting predictions for the capture-zones, capture numbers, and island-size distributions are in excellent agreement with experimental results and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. To appear in Computer Physics Communications, proceedings of the STATPHYS Satellite Conference: Challenges in Computational Statistical Physics in the 21st Century (July 30, 2001)