Two-dimensional Ostwald ripening on a patterned support and in a mixed overlayer

Journal article, 2016

The author presents lattice Monte Carlo simulations of Ostwald ripening of islands formed of monomers with attractive nearest-neighbor interaction in two situations. The first one implies that monomers of one kind are located on a heterogeneous support which itself includes embedded frozen patterns of the Ostwald type. This feature is demonstrated to be able to terminate the island ripening. In the second case, the support is considered to be uniform while the overlayer is assumed to contain monomers of two kinds. This complicating factor is found to nearly not modify the ripening kinetics or make it somewhat slower despite appreciable correlations in the arrangement of different monomers.