Abstract
Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations are used to investigate the dynamics of island growth during submonolayer epitaxy in the presence of anisotropic surface diffusion, and the influence of a recently hypothesized crowdion diffusion mechanism. An existing rate equation mean-field analysis of island growth is extended to include anisotropic diffusion. The mean-field analysis is found to be at odds with results from KMC simulations indicating that the details of the surface diffusion mechanism influence the nucleation rate. It is found that anisotropy in adatom hopping reduces the density of stable islands. It is also found that although the shape of the island size distribution is sensitive to island relaxation processes, it is not discernibly affected by hopping anisotropy with ratios ${D}_{xx}∕{D}_{yy}$ up to 16.
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