Kinetic Monte Carlo study of crystal growth from solution Original Research Article

A study of both surface micromorphology and growth kinetics of the (001) face of a crystal growing from solution is performed on the basis of Monte Carlo simulations taking into account surface diffusion. Special attention is paid to growth simulations performed for layer-by-layer growth mechanism. An influence of the size of two-dimensional array describing crystal surface on simulation results is also discussed. The presented results show that the size of the surface array affects both growth mechanism and growth rate. The simulation results are confronted with predictions of crystal growth theories. The influence of surface diffusion on growth process is compared with some results reported for vapor growth, and it is found that for solution growth, the influence is much weaker. An implementation of fast simulation algorithm with explicit growth time is presented. It is revealed that calculations of the average crystal growth rate using time proportional to the number of events fail in the case of the perfect face growing at low supersaturations.