The present talk aims to review the current theoretical understanding of mass transport on inhomogeneous surfaces.  Such surfaces, inhomogeneous on a structural and/or chemical point of view, are more and more used as functionalized substrates for organizing the matter at nanoscale by over deposition of atoms. We will first focus on a description of the different types of inhomogeneous surfaces such as the reconstructed surfaces and the vicinale ones. Both natural and ``heteroepitaxial-induced'' reconstructed surfaces will be describe. The second part  will be dedicated to the theoretical approaches  used to investigate the mass transport phenomena on such surfaces. Both energy functionals, used to imitate the interatomic bonds,  and methods, employed to determine the dynamic behavior of the atoms, will be considered. Especially, we will show that the concerted use of classical molecular dynamics, to determine the actual involved microscopic processes, and energy minization procedures to calculate potential energies along diffusion pathways, allows a comprehensive description of the intricated atomic processes in such complex systems. In the last part, we will list some issues characteristic of diffusion on inhomogeneous surfaces as obtained following the previously described working procedure. Specific processes occurring at the inhomogeneous surface, such as preferential nucleation, diffusion anisotropy[1], strain-induced exchange[2] and solitonic diffusion[3], will be describe.

References

[1] H. Bulou and C. Massobrio, J. Phys. Chem. C,  in press (2008).

[2] H. Bulou and C. Massobrio, Phys. Rev. B 72, 205427 (2005).

[3] H. Bulou and J.-P. Bucher, Phys. Rev. Lett.  96, 076102 (2006).

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