We present Monte Carlo simulations for the size and temperature dependence of the diffusion coefficient of adatom islands on the Cu(100) surface. We show that the scaling exponent for the size dependence is not a constant but a decreasing function of the island size and approaches unity for very large islands. This is due to a crossover from periphery dominated mass transport to a regime where vacancies diffuse inside the island. The effective scaling exponents are in good agreement with theory and experiments.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9903186,
title = {Island diffusion on metal fcc(100) surfaces},
author = {J. Heinonen and I. Koponen and J. Merikoski and T. Ala-Nissila},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9903186},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
13 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. Lett