Rate-Equation Approach to Island Capture Zones and Size Distributions in Epitaxial Growth

Understanding and predicting the effects of correlations between island size and the rate of monomer capture has been shown to be the central problem in predicting the island-size distribution in submonolayer growth. Here we summarize a method which involves a self-consistent coupling of evolution equations for the capture-zone distributions with rate equations for the island-size distribution. The method has been successfully applied to irreversible submonolayer growth in both one and two dimensions to predict the size-dependent capture numbers and island-size distributions.