Role of codeposited impurities during growth. II. Dependence of morphology on binding and barrier energies

Rajesh Sathiyanarayanan, Ajmi BH. Hamouda, A. Pimpinelli, T. L. Einstein
2011 Physical Review B  
In an accompanying article we showed that surface morphologies obtained through codeposition of a small quantity (2%) of impurities with Cu during growth (step-flow mode, θ = 40 ML) significantly depends on the lateral nearest-neighbor binding energy (E NN ) to Cu adatom and the diffusion barrier (E d ) of the impurity atom on Cu(0 0 1). Based on these two energy parameters, E NN and E d , we classify impurity atoms into four sets. We study island nucleation and growth in the presence of
more » ... ited impurities from different sets in the submonolayer (θ 0.7 ML) regime. Similar to growth in the step-flow mode, we find different nucleation and growth behavior for impurities from different sets. We characterize these differences through variations of the number of islands (N i ) and the average island size with coverage (θ). Further, we compute the critical nucleus size (i) for all of these cases from the distribution of capture-zone areas using the generalized Wigner distribution.
doi:10.1103/physrevb.83.035424 fatcat:z7m73cpwlzgxtenyskk3q4ek2y