Eur. Phys. J. B (2012) 85: 152
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-20756-4

Regular Article

Fractal growth in the presence of a surface force field

Laboratoire Aimé Cotton, Bât. 505, CNRS II, Campus d’Orsay, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France

^a e-mail: frederic.carlier@u-psud.fr

Received: 13 September 2011
Received in final form: 10 February 2012
Published online: 16 May 2012

Abstract

We numerically simulate the dynamics of atomic clusters aggregation deposited on a surface interacting with the growing island. We make use of the well-known DLA model but replace the underlying diffusion equation by the Smoluchowski equation which results in a drifted DLA model and anisotropic jump probabilities. The shape of the structures resulting from their aggregation-limited random walk is affected by the presence of a Laplacian potential due to, for instance, the surface stress field. We characterize the morphologies we obtain by their Hausdorff fractal dimension as well as the so-called external fractal dimension. We compare our results to previously published experimental results for antimony and silver clusters deposited onto graphite surface.