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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2011
Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation of atomistic models reveals the failure of mean-field treatments of the island size distribution (ISD) for islands formed by homogeneous nucleation during submonolayer deposition on perfect surfaces. KMC also facilitates analysis of scaling properties of the ISD, although here some misperceptions persist which we attempt to clarify. However, KMC becomes inefficient for highly reversible island formation (e.g., for large values of a critical size, i, above which islands are stable) due to the high density of diffusing adatoms on the surface. This reduced efficiency is quantified here with results for CPU time versus i. This feature has motivated development of alternative beyond-mean-field coarse-grained approaches which should be more efficient for large i. We provide results for the ISD for a range of i = 1, 2, 3, and 6 using one such approach, a stochastic geometry-based simulation (GBS) strategy.