Novel formation and decay mechanisms of nanostructures on surface

For decades research on thin-film growth has attracted a lot of attention as these kinds of materials have the potential in new generation device application. It is known that the nuclei at initial stage of the islands are more stable than others and certain atoms are inert while others are active. In this paper, we will show that, when a surfactant layer is used to mediate the growth, a counter-intuitive fractal-to-compact island shape transition can be induced by increasing deposition flux or decreasing growth temperature. Specifically, we introduce a reaction-limited aggregation (RLA) theory, where the physical process controlling the island shape transition is the shielding effect of adatoms stuck to stable islands on incoming adatoms. Also discussed are the origin of a transition from triangular to hexagonal then to inverted triangular and the decay characteristics of 3D islands on surface, and connections of our unique predictions with recent experiments. Furthermore, we will present a novel idea to make use of the condensation energy of adatoms to control the island evolution along special direction.