Characterising submonolayer deposition via visibility graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visibility graph method to analyze kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of submonolayer deposition, enabling the extraction of critical island size and insights into nucleation and growth processes.

Contribution

The paper presents an efficient algorithm for constructing visibility graphs from kMC simulation data and demonstrates its ability to determine critical island size.

Findings

Visibility graphs encode size and spatial information.

Critical island size can be inferred from graph properties.

Method provides new insights into nucleation and growth mechanisms.

Abstract

We use visibility graphs as a tool to analyse the results of kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulations of submonolayer deposition in a one-dimensional point island model. We introduce an efficient algorithm for the computation of the visibility graph resulting from a kMC simulation and show that from the properties of the visibility graph one can determine the critical island size, thus demonstrating that the visibility graph approach, which implicitly combines size and spatial data, can provide insights into island nucleation and growth processes.