Determination of step--edge barriers to interlayer transport from surface morphology during the initial stages of homoepitaxial growth

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to determine step-edge barriers during initial homoepitaxial growth by analyzing surface morphology, validated through simulations and applied to experimental data of Fe, Pt, and Ag surfaces.

Contribution

It introduces analytic formulae derived from a simple growth model to estimate step-edge barriers from surface morphology data.

Findings

Validated formulae with kinetic Monte Carlo simulations.

Estimated step-edge barriers from STM data for Fe(001), Pt(111), and Ag(111).

Provided insights into interlayer transport during early growth stages.

Abstract

We use analytic formulae obtained from a simple model of crystal growth by molecular--beam epitaxy to determine step--edge barriers to interlayer transport. The method is based on information about the surface morphology at the onset of nucleation on top of first--layer islands in the submonolayer coverage regime of homoepitaxial growth. The formulae are tested using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of a solid--on--solid model and applied to estimate step--edge barriers from scanning--tunneling microscopy data on initial stages of Fe(001), Pt(111), and Ag(111) homoepitaxy.