Controlling nucleation rates in nanostructures with electron confinement

One of the goals for growing low dimensional structures is to explore their electronic structure variation with size due to confinement. Recent experiments in Pb adsorption on Pb islands of stable and unstable height at low temperatures have shown a spectacular variation in the nucleated island density (∼60 times) as a function of height. With Monte Carlo simulations we can faithfully reproduce the observed morphologies with a single assumption that ic is different on stable and unstable islands. This shows that confinement can result in large oscillations of nucleation rates and adsorption.