Adatom interaction effects in surface diffusion

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interatomic interactions influence adatom surface diffusion by deriving a nonlinear diffusion equation through a mean-field approach, validated by numerical simulations, enabling estimation of interaction parameters from concentration profiles.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field derived nonlinear diffusion model for adatom interactions and validates it against numerical simulations, providing a method to estimate interaction strength from experimental data.

Findings

Nonlinear diffusion equation accurately models adatom interactions.

Good agreement between analytical solutions and numerical simulations.

Method to estimate interaction parameters from concentration profiles.

Abstract

Motivated by recent research of Nikitin et al. (J.Phys.D vol. 49, 055301(2009)), we examine the effects of interatomic interactions on adatom surface diffusion. By using a mean-field approach in the random walk problem, we derive a nonlinear diffusion equation and analyze its solutions. The results of our analysis are in good agreement with direct numerical simulations of the corresponding discrete model. It is shown that by analyzing a time dependence of adatom concentration profiles one can estimate the type and strength of interatomic interactions.