Long-lived transient vacancy distribution in multilayers

We investigate the vacancy distribution in A/B phase-separating (111) multilayer at low temperature, about 0.25T_c. Three-dimensional kinetic Monte Carlo simulations with a vacancy-diffusion mechanism are performed. The atomic diffusion model accounts for the energy differences in formation ΔE^f and in migration ΔE^m of vacancies in the two terminal phases. We show that the migration term Δm^f may lead to long lived transient vacancy distributions. The latter are interpreted by using a modified kinetic mean-field approach that accounts for some local dynamic correlations.