A STOCHASTIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF ATOMISTIC PROCESSES IN THE EARLY STAGES OF THIN-FILM GROWTH

Much progress has been made in recent years in understanding the mecha nistic details of atomistic processes in the early stages of thin-film growth. We present in this paper a ''shorthand'' theoretical method f or assessing the statistical consequences of different assumptions on the mechanism of island growth, and we illustrate the generality of th e method using several examples. The method is based on constructing t ransformations of the fundamental matrix of the theory of finite Marko v processes.