A multiscale method for epitaxial growth

In this paper we investigate a heterogeneous multiscale method (HMM) for interface tracking and apply the technique to the simulation of epitaxial growth. HMM relies on an efficient coupling between macroscale and microscale models. When the macroscale model is not fully known explicitly or not accurate enough, HMM provides a procedure for supplementing the missing data from a microscale model. Here we design a multiscale method that couples kinetic Monte-Carlo (KMC) simulations on the microscale with the island dynamics model based on the level set method and a diffusion equation. We perform the numerical simulations for submonolayer island growth and step edge evolutions on the macroscale domain while keeping the KMC modeling of the internal boundary conditions. Our goal is to get comparably accurate solutions at potentially lower computational cost than for the full KMC simulations, especially for the step flow problem without nucleation.
QC 20120102