Publication #139
Nucleation and Growth of Thin Films
J. A. Venables, G.D.T. Spiller and M.Hanbücken,
Reports on Progress in Physics 47 (1984) 399-459.
Abstract
A review is given of the nucleation and growth processes occurring in
thin film formation. Emphasis is given to quantitative nucleation
theories and to the role of electron microscopy and surface techniques
in providing data to test such theories. The relations between the thermodynamics
of adsorption and the kinetics of crystal growth is stressed. Experimental
examples are taken from the island growth, layer plus island (or Stranski-
Krastanov) and layer growth modes. The shapes of growing crystallites are
briefly discussed.
We are pleased that you have been reading this, our most cited paper! You have
probably noticed some iritating errors, which are primarily mismatches between
the figures and the text. The ones we have found are:
- page 402, fig 1: panels (a) and (c) should be interchanged in the figure,
keeping the figure caption and text as they are.
- page 426, fig 13: here the figure and caption are correct, but the text
needs (a) and (c) interchanging on lines 1 and 9.
- page 432, fig 19 caption: remove the note in brackets at the end, which is not
in accord with the figure.
Those who have quoted this paper may not have read the more recent papers, where
the methods used for calculation of these 'mean field' nucleation models are
spelt out in detail. I have been particularly concerned to
include adatom vibrations (within the Einstein model), in order to make contact
with models of the vapor pressure, as spelt out in my
1987 Phys. Rev. B paper, and incorporated into later
papers and experiment-theory comparisons. Some of this work is described in a
tutorial spirit in my graduate teaching book
which came out in the late Summer of 2000.