Nucleation and growth processes during molecular-beam epitaxy of ternary compounds

In this letter the effect of the different migration rates of two kinds of cations on the nucleation and growth processes during molecular-beam epitaxy of ternary systems was studied in detail by Monte Carlo simulation. In AlGaAs ternary system, in which the migration rate of cation Ga is larger than that of Al, there are three types of nucleation: Ga-Ga, Al-Ga and Al-Al, which show different characteristics in the growth processes.