Reversible island nucleation and growth with anomalous diffusion

Abstract

Abstract: Motivated by recent experiments on submonolayer organic film growth with anomalous diffusion, a general rate-equation (RE) theory of submonolayer island nucleation and growth was developed (Amar and Semaan, 2016)[23], which takes into account the critical island-size i, island fractal dimension d f, substrate dimension d, and diffusion exponent μ, and good agreement with simulations was found for the case of irreversible growth corresponding to a critical island-size i= 1 with d= 2. However, since many experiments correspond to a critical island-size larger than 1, it is of interest to determine if the RE predictions also hold in the case of reversible island nucleation with anomalous diffusion. Here we present the results of simulations of submonolayer growth with i= 2 (d= 2) which were carried out for both the case of superdiffusion (μ> 1) and subdiffusion (μ< 1) as well as for both ramified islands (d f≃ 2) and point.