Abstract

Ostwald ripening in homoepitaxy in the submonolayer regime is studied by means of numerical simulations. The simulations indicate, that the coarsening kinetics of the average island radius is described by a t1/a power law, where 2 ≤ a ≤ 3. Here a approaches 2, if the ripening is purely kinetics limited (low attachment rate at the island boundaries) and increases with increasing attachment rate — taking the value a = 3 if the ripening is purely diffusion limited (infinite attachment rate at the island boundaries). For the two limiting cases the classical LSW theory is reviewed and compared with the numerical simulations. Besides the scaling law we also investigate the asymptotic scaled island size distribution function and analyse the influence of anisotropic edge energies and the effect of edge diffusion.

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