Limits of size scalability of diffusion and growth: Atoms versus molecules versus colloids

Understanding fundamental growth processes is key to the control of nonequilibrium structure formation for a wide range of materials on all length scales, from atomic to molecular and even colloidal systems. While atomic systems are relatively well studied, molecular and colloidal growth are currently moving more into the focus. This poses the question to what extent growth laws are size scalable between different material systems. We study this question by analyzing the potential energy landscape and performing kinetic Monte Carlo simulations for three representative systems. While submonolayer (island) growth is found to be essentially scalable, we find marked differences when moving into the third (vertical) dimension.