Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of Si/Si(111)7×7 homoepitaxy

Abstract

Kinetic processes that influence epitaxial growth of thin films are being more and more explored. Recent observations of growth on reconstructed surfaces suggested that material attachment to existing islands may be hindered by a barrier to attachment. We present a kinetic Monte Carlo model of Si/Si(111)7×7 homoepitaxy with the barrier to attachment implemented. We show that this model successfully reproduces available experimental results obtained during initial stages of growth and during surface relaxation. We show that the high scaling exponents experimentally observed are due to specific growth kinetics of the Si/Si(111)7×7 system.