2002/09/30 by Paolo Politi, Claudio Castellano
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.67.075408
published as Phys. Rev. B 67, 075408 (2003) · 11 pages. Table I corrected and one appendix added. To be published in Phys. Rev. B (scheduled issue: 15 February 2003)
arxiv created 2002/12/19 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Recently, the nucleation rate on top of a terrace during the irreversible growth of a crystal surface by MBE has been determined exactly. In this paper we go beyond the standard model usually employed to study the nucleation process, and we analyze the qualitative and quantitative consequences of two important additional physical ingredients: the nonuniformity of the Ehrlich-Schwoebel barrier at the step-edge, because of the existence of kinks, and the steering effects, due to the interaction between the atoms of the flux and the substrate. We apply our results to typical experiments of second layer nucleation.