One-dimensional island size distribution: From non-equilibrium to equilibrium

Non-equilibrium island size distribution in one dimension

“…As can be clearly seen from figure 3, condition ( 25) is satisfied for temperatures above 100 K and for a large interval of gap G. Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations showed that transition from one state of thermodynamical equilibrium to another one occurs through a non-equilibrium state [11]. The transition from one equilibrium state to another consists of two stages [11]. The first stage is Ostwald ripening.…”

“…Let us consider a system in which the temperature drops sharply from T 1 to T 2 at time t = 0. It has been shown that during the cooling process, the transition from one state of thermodynamical equilibrium to another occurs through a non-equilibrium state [11]. This transition is accompanied by the decay of one-dimensional islands in the first stage.…”

“…The recent advances in the production of one-dimensional islands on vicinal surfaces with a narrow terrace-size distribution [1][2][3][4] and low-index semiconductor surfaces [5][6][7][8] have motivated the study of models that describe the growth of one-dimensional islands on surfaces under certain conditions [2,[9][10][11][12]. Therefore, one of the central problems is to determine the factors that affect the length of one-dimensional structures.…”

“…The second one is based on the rate equations [17]. And the third one is based on kinetic Monte Carlo simulations [11,12,[18][19][20][21]. However, the most popular approach is to use a combination of rate equations with kinetic Monte Carlo simulations and then to compare their results [13,14,[22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…However, the discrepancy between the experiment [4] and the theory [12] turned out to be significant. Moreover, the theoretical models did not take into account the fact that during annealing or cooling the transition from one state of thermodynamical equilibrium to another occurs through a non-equilibrium state [11].…”