Abstract
We investigate an influence of edge diffusion on island formation in molecular beam epitaxy. Edge diffusion not only yields compact islands but also results in small clusters such as dimers and trimers mobile. We find that both the morphology of islands and the mobility of small clusters yield nontrivial effects on the power–law behavior of the monomer and island densities and the scaling functions of the island size distributions. When dimers and trimers are stable, an influence of the morphology of islands on the power–law behavior is found to be negligible. On the other hand, when dimers and trimers are subject to diffuse, the scaling powers and the scaling functions vary depending on the degrees of the mobility for both the fractal growth and the compact growth models. The morphology of islands in this case influences the power–law behavior of only the monomer density.
