Self-organization of iron-atom nanostructures in the first layer of the (100) copper surface

Mechanisms of the diffusion of surface vacancies and iron atoms in the first layer of the Cu(100) surface have been studied by molecular dynamics and the kinetic Monte Carlo method. The diffusion of embedded atoms results in the self-organization of bound iron-atom nanostructures. The time dependences of the number of most widespread nanostructures have been obtained. According to the results, the self-organization of embedded nanostructures can be divided into three stages in which the copper surface has significantly different morphologies.