Rate-equation approach to island capture zones and size distributions in epitaxial growth

Understanding and predicting the effects of correlations between island siz e and the rate of monomer capture has been shown to be the central problem in predicting the island-size distribution in submonolayer growth. Here we summarize a method which involves a self-consistent coupling of evolution e quations for the capture-zone distributions with rate equations for the isl and-size distribution. The method has been successfully applied to irrevers ible submonolayer growth in both one and two dimensions to predict the size -dependent capture numbers and island-size distributions.