Kinetics of shape equilibration for two-dimensional islands

Abstract

We study the relaxation to equilibrium of two dimensional islands containing up to 20000 atoms by Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the commonly assumed relaxation mechanism - curvature-driven relaxation via atom diffusion - cannot explain the results obtained at low temperatures, where the island edges consist in large facets. Specifically, our simulations show that the exponent characterizing the dependence of the equilibration time on the island size is different at high and low temperatures, in contradiction with the above cited assumptions. Instead, we propose that - at low temperatures - the relaxation is limited by the nucleation of new atomic rows on the large facets : this allows us to explain both the activation energy and the island size dependence of the equilibration time.

9 pages, revtex

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Growth of nanostructures by cluster deposition : a review
• Changing shapes in the nanoworld
• Diffusion of gold nanoclusters on graphite
• A contiuum model for low temperature relaxation of crystal steps
• Low temperature shape relaxation of 2-d islands by edge diffusion
• Relaxation of Terrace-width Distributions: Physical Information from Fokker-Planck Time
• Relaxation kinetics in two-dimensional structures
• Fast growth at low temperature in vacancy-mediated phase-separation
• Single-layer metal-on-metal islands driven by strong time-dependent forces