Impact of monomer evaporation on the statistics of island arrays formed in thin film deposition simulations

The statistics of island arrays formed in thin film deposition simulations with monomer evaporation are investigated. Island size distributions are found that depend on evaporation rate that also display scaling with substrate coverage. Scaling behaviour in the extreme cases of no evaporation or very strong evaporation are explained in terms of capture zones and the Avrami model, respectively. The scaling in the intermediate cases can be understood from a linear mixture of these two types of extreme. The monomer evaporation also impacts on the spatial ordering of the island arrays. A measure of disorder is introduced that changes monotonically with evaporation rate and coverage to distinguish the systems. In the case of strong evaporation the islands are almost entirely at random positions on the substrate, whereas at lower evaporation rates the islands become more correlated due to inhomogeneity in the time-averaged monomer density on the substrate. This behaviour is reflected in the structure factors for the various island arrays.