Nanofinger growth on Au(111) arising from kinetic instability

In recent experiments, nanofingers were obtained by repeatedly scanning a Au (111) surface with a scanning tunneling microscope tip. In the present work, a lattice model for the growth of nanofingers on the Au (111) surface is developed. Within this model, the activation barriers for diffusion are obtained by realistic semiempirical calculations, and the dynamics are reproduced using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. The simulation results are compared to the experiments, and the influence of various elementary atomic diffusion processes on the shape and size distribution of the nanofingers is analyzed.