Simulation of the submonolayer homoepitaxial clusters growth on Ag(110)

The submonolayer growth of Ag/Ag(110) is studied by kinetic Monte Carlo sim ulations including deposition, diffusion, and fully reversible aggregation with both anisotropic diffusion barriers and anisotropic bond energies. The barriers for the elementary diffusion processes, including the Schwoebel b arrier at step borders, are calculated by many-body tight-binding potential s. Depending on growth conditions (temperature T, adatom flux F; and covera ge theta) the model shows morphology transitions to one-dimensional (1D) in -channel strips and then to 2D or 3D compact islands. At low T, the island density n(I) versus theta shows the nucleation, growth (at saturation densi ty), and the coalescence regimes, whereas at higher T, at which point detac hment from islands becomes effective, n(I) presents a maximum at very low t heta, followed by a decrease, at first caused by island dissolution and the n, for higher B, by coalescence.