Colloquium: Cluster growth on surfaces - densities, size distributions and morphologies

Abstract

Understanding and control of cluster and thin film growth on solid surfaces is a subject of intensive research to develop nanomaterials with new physical properties. In this Colloquium we review basic theoretical concepts to describe submonolayer growth kinetics under non-equilibrium conditions. It is shown how these concepts can be extended and further developed to treat self-organized cluster formation in material systems of current interest, such as nanoalloys and molecular clusters in organic thin film growth. The presentation is focused on ideal flat surfaces to limit the scope and to discuss key ideas in a transparent way. Open experimental and theoretical challenges are pointed out.

21 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (6)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Nucleation and growth of thin films of rod--like conjugated molecules
• Capture-zone scaling in island nucleation: phenomenological theory of an example of universal fluctuation behavior
• Capture numbers and islands size distributions in models of submonolayer surface growth
• Crossover in the scaling of island size and capture zone distributions
• Irreversible nucleation in molecular beam epitaxy: From theory to experiments

Cited by in corpus (27)

• From infinitesimal to full contact between rough surfaces: evolution of the contact area
• Towards edge engineering of two-dimensional layered transition-metal dichalcogenides by chemical vapor deposition
• Ehrlich-Schwoebel Effect on the Growth Dynamics of GaAs(111)A surfaces
• Instabilities of layers of deposited molecules on chemically stripe patterned substrates: Ridges vs. drops
• Narrowing of d bands of FeCo layers intercalated under graphene
• Thin film growth models with long surface diffusion lengths
• Analyzing Capture Zone Distributions (CZD) in Growth: Theory and Applications
• Monolayers of hard rods on planar substrates: II. Growth
• How "hot precursors" modify island nucleation: A rate-equations model
• Point Island Models for Nucleation and Growth of Supported Nanoclusters during Surface Deposition
• Domain formation in the deposition of thin films of two-component mixtures
• Modeling epitaxial film growth of C${}_{60}$ revisited
• Multiscale modelling of structure formation of C${}_{60}$ on insulating CaF${}_2$ substrates
• Bismuth surfactant-enhanced III-As epitaxy on GaAs(111)A
• Scaling of alloy interfacial properties under compositional strain
• Thin Film Growth of Phase-Separating Phthalocyanine-Fullerene Blends: A Combined Experimental and Computational Study
• Height fluctuations in homoepitaxial thin film growth: A numerical study
• Phase Coexistence of Mn Trimer Clusters and Antiferromagnetic Mn Islands on Ir(111)
• Self-consistent rate theory for submonolayer surface growth of multi-component systems
• Analysis of magic lengths in growth of supported metallic nanowires
• Diffusion coefficients from signal fluctuations: Influence of molecular shape and rotational diffusion
• Distributional fixed-point equations for island nucleation in one dimension: The inverse problem
• Point island dynamics under fixed rate deposition
• Ordering and order-disorder phase transition in the (1x1) monolayer chemisorbed on the (111) face of an fcc crystal
• Deposition, diffusion, and nucleation on an interval
• Characterising submonolayer deposition via visibility graphs
• Analytic self-similar solutions of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang interface growing equation with various noise term