Point Island Models for Nucleation and Growth of Supported Nanoclusters during Surface Deposition

TL;DR

This paper introduces point island models (PIMs) for simulating the nucleation and growth of supported nanoclusters during surface deposition, effectively capturing size and spatial distributions at low coverages.

Contribution

The paper presents a simplified yet effective PIM framework that models islands as single sites, providing fundamental insights into nucleation and growth processes on crystalline surfaces.

Findings

PIMs accurately describe island size distributions.

PIMs can be adapted for diffusion-limited and attachment-limited growth.

Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations validate the models.

Abstract

Point island models (PIMs) are presented for the formation of supported nanoclusters (or islands) during deposition on flat crystalline substrates at lower submonolayer coverages. These models treat islands as occupying a single adsorption site, although carrying a label to track their size (i.e., they suppress island structure). However, they are particularly effective in describing the island size and spatial distributions. In fact, these PIMs provide fundamental insight into the key features for homogeneous nucleation and growth processes on surfaces. PIMs are also versatile being readily adapted to treat both diffusion-limited and attachment-limited growth, and also a variety of other nucleation processes with modified mechanisms. Their behavior is readily and precisely assessed by kinetic Monte Carlo simulation.