The process of irreversible nucleation in multilayer growth. II. Exact results in one and two dimensions

Paolo Politi, Claudio Castellano

Published 2002-07-16Version 1

We study irreversible dimer nucleation on top of terraces during epitaxial growth in one and two dimensions, for all values of the step-edge barrier. The problem is solved exactly by transforming it into a first passage problem for a random walker in a higher-dimensional space. The spatial distribution of nucleation events is shown to differ markedly from the mean-field estimate except in the limit of very weak step-edge barriers. The nucleation rate is computed exactly, including numerical prefactors.