Abstract
We study the usual temperature dependence of the island density in the submonolayer pulsed-laser deposition. We observe that the island density is enhanced in a certain interval of the temperatures due to the interplay between the cluster decay time and the interval between pulses. We find that the anomalous behaviour is caused by the temperature limited stability of the closed-compact clusters which is affected by the strength of the adatom-adatom binding. We suppose that this anomalous behaviour will be generic for systems in which adatom-adatom interaction is stronger than binding to a substrate. Such unusual feature is not observed for molecular-beam epitaxy with the same material parameters due to low concentration of small islands.