Epitaxial growth with elastic interaction: submonolayer island formation

A model for island formation in submonolayer epitaxy has been studied in the presence of elastic strain by means of a Monte Carlo simulation. The description, based on rate equations, leads to scaling predictions for cluster statistics and diffusion rates. We generalize these predictions to include the effects of the repulsive elastic interaction. The elastic interaction is caused by the deformation of the underlying substrate and has a repulsive 1/r(3) character. To enable the efficient simulation of multiparticle surface diffusion with long-range interaction, we employ a multigrid scheme. One particular result is that, with increasing elastic repulsion between the adsorbed particles, the formation of islands is hampered, and island nucleation is deferred to higher coverage values.