Regensburg 2000 – scientific programme
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DY: Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 42: Wachstum und Grenzfl
ächen
DY 42.4: Talk
Thursday, March 30, 2000, 11:45–12:00, H2
Theory of island spacing in 1D island growth systems — •Christopher Pownall1 and Paul Mulheran2 — 1Physik-Department der Technischen Universität München, D-85747 Garching — 2Department of Physics, The University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 220, Reading RG6 6AF, United Kingdom
One of the challenges in the development of low-dimensional structures is that of fabricating an array of regularly spaced and evenly sized clusters of atoms (islands), using self-organization methods. In this theoretical study we investigate the distribution of inter-island gap sizes in different 1D models of island growth. This distribution has been found to exhibit scaling, that is if the gap sizes are divided by their mean value a universal curve is obtained, independent of the diffusion to deposition ratio and the coverage. We find that the shape of this universal curve becomes narrower at higher critical island sizes i (i+1 atoms is the minimum stable island size), indicating that the islands are more evenly spaced. A master equation is constructed to evaluate this distribution, and the results compare favourably with Monte Carlo simulations and other numerical studies. It is found that above i ≈ 5 significant improvements in the spacing of the islands is observed.