Effect of cluster size on Cu/Au(111) epitaxy

Investigations of the size effect on the epitaxy when a Cu cluster was soft ly deposited onto Au(111) were performed using molecular dynamics, combing the tight-binding interaction potential with electron-phonon coupling. Thes e studies reveal that epitaxy can be obtained more easily for small cluster s than for the large ones after deposition. The critical cluster size to ob tain epitaxy depends strongly on the incident energy and ambient temperatur e. Moreover, the initial structure of the cluster is also responsible for e pitaxy. Here, it is shown that the lattice distortion in the cluster-substr ate interface is the most serious compared with the distortion in other lay ers.