ATOM DEPOSITION ON SURFACE CLUSTERS - THIN-FILM GROWTH ON PD(111)

We have studied the vapor phase deposition of single metal atoms on two-dimensional clusters at the Pd(111) surface. The system considered here are heptamers and dodecamers for the substrate temperature of 100 K. Using molecular dynamics simulations with the corrected effective medium potentials for Pd, Cu and Rh, we have found that an adatom either diffuses on the cluster or incorporates itself into the cluster depending on the size of clusters and the kind of metals in the gas/cluster system. We also discovered that incorporation of a deposited gas atom into a surface cluster at 100 K was not a consequence of the reduction of the barrier heights at the step edges and that the type of post-impact dynamics for hexagonal heptamers depends on the impact point.