Two-step unconventional protocol for epitaxial growth in one dimension with hindered reactions

Abstract

We study the effect of hindered aggregation and/or nucleation on the island formation process in a two-step growth protocol. In the proposed model, the attachment of monomers to islands and/or other monomers is hindered by additional energy barriers which decrease the hopping rate of the monomers to the occupied sites of the lattice. For zero and weak barriers, the attachment is limited by diffusion while for strong barriers it is limited by reaction. We describe the time evolution of the system in terms of the monomer and island densities, N1 and N. We also calculate the gap length, the capture zone and the island distributions. For all the sets of barriers considered, the results given by the proposed analytical model are compared with those from kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. We found that the behavior of the system depends on the ratio of the nucleation barrier to the aggregation barrier. The two-step growth protocol allows more control and understanding on the island formation mechanism because it intrinsically separates the nucleation and aggregation processes in different time regimes.