Atomistic modeling of epitaxial growth: comparisons between lattice models and experiment

Abstract Modeling the growth-front profile of an epitaxial film requires atomic-scale processes such as adatom motion and step-adatom interactions to be folded into more ‘coarse-grained’ length and time scales that are of direct experimental relevance. This, in turn, necessitates making a compromise between the detailed information provided by ab initio methods on limited aspects of growth kinetics and the computational flexibility afforded by methods such as Monte Carlo simulations and the analysis of continuum equations, where many detailed features of the growth are not treated explicitly. We will review the types of information that can be obtained with Monte Carlo simulations of simple lattice models with a view to making direct comparisons with diffraction and scanning tunneling microscopy measurements.