Island Size Selectivity during 2D Ag Island Coarsening on Ag (111)

Abstract

We report on early stages of submonolayer Ag island coarsening on Ag(111) surface at room temperature ($300$ K) carried out using realistic kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations. We find that during early stages, coarsening proceeds as a sequence of selected island sizes creating peaks and valleys in the island size distribution. We find that island-size selectivity is due to formation of kinetically stable islands for certain sizes because of adatom detachment/attachment processes and large activation barrier for kink detachment. In addition, we find that the ratio of number of adatom attachment to detachment processes to be independent of parameters of initial configuration and also on the initial shapes of the islands confirming that island-size selectivity is independent of initial conditions.These simulations were carried out using a very large database of processes identified by their local environment and whose activation barriers were calculated using the embedded-atom method.

References in corpus (1)

• Self-learning Kinetic Monte-Carlo method: application to Cu(111)

Cited by in corpus (4)

• New off-lattice Pattern Recognition Scheme for off-lattice kinetic Monte Carlo Simulations
• SLKMC-II study of self-diffusion of small Ni clusters on Ni (111) surface
• Extended Pattern Recognition Scheme for Self-learning Kinetic Monte Carlo (SLKMC-II) Simulations
• Island Size Selectivity and island-shape analysis during 2D Island Coarsening of Ag/Ag (111) Surface