  The pre-patterning of a substrate to create energetically more attractive or
repulsive regions allows one to generate a variety of structures in physical
vapor deposition experiments. A particular interesting structure is generated
if the energetically attractive region is forming a rectangular grid. For
specific combinations of the particle flux, the substrate temperature and the
lattice size it is possible to generate exactly one cluster per cell, giving
rise to nucleation control. Here, we show that the experimental observations of
nucleation control can be very well understood from a theoretical perspective.
For this purpose we perform, on the one hand, kinetic Monte Carlo simulations
and, on the other hand, use analytical scaling arguments to rationalize the
observed behavior. For several observables, characterizing nucleation control,
a very good agreement is found between experiment and theory. This underlines
the generality of the presented mechanism to control the deposition of material
by manipulation of the direct environment.
