Coalescence and impingement between islands in thin film growth: Behavior of the island density kinetics

Coalescence and impingement, which in the time domain give rise to completely different kinetics for the density of islands, are shown to lead to common kinetics in the domain of the fraction of covered surface in the case of thin-film growth after simultaneous nucleation. This result allows one to treat the more involved intermediate case (partial coalescence) in a rather straightforward way. On this basis experimental data taken from the literature are discussed and reanalyzed in order to evaluate the saturation density of the nuclei