Epitaxial Growth Kinetics with Interacting Coherent Islands

TL;DR

This paper develops a mean field rate theory to analyze the growth kinetics of coherent islands in epitaxial growth, accounting for elastic interactions that influence island detachment and size distribution.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent model incorporating elastic interactions, providing semi-quantitative agreement with experimental data on island density and size evolution.

Findings

Elastic interactions facilitate atom detachment from islands.

Model reproduces initial increase and subsequent decrease in island size distribution.

Semi-quantitative agreement with experimental growth kinetics.

Abstract

The Stranski-Krastanov growth kinetics of undislocated (coherent) 3-dimensional islands is studied with a self-consistent mean field rate theory that takes account of elastic interactions between the islands. The latter are presumed to facilitate the detachment of atoms from the islands with a consequent decrease in their average size. Semi-quantitative agreement with experiment is found for the time evolution of the total island density and the mean island size. When combined with scaling ideas, these results provide a natural way to understand the often-observed initial increase and subsequent decrease in the width of the coherent island size distribution.