  It has been observed experimentally that under certain conditions pulsed
laser deposition (PLD) produces smoother surfaces than ordinary molecular beam
epitaxy (MBE). So far the mechanism leading to the improved quality of surfaces
in PLD is not yet fully understood. In the present work we investigate the
physical properties of a simple model for PLD in which the transient mobility
of adatoms and diffusion along edges is neglected. Analyzing the crossover from
MBE to PLD, the scaling properties of the time-dependent nucleation density as
well as the influence of Ehrlich-Schwoebel barriers we find that there is
indeed a range of parameters where the surface quality in PLD is better than in
MBE. However, since the improvement is weak and occurs only in a small range of
parameters we conclude that deposition in pulses alone cannot explain the
experimentally observed smoothness of PLD-grown surfaces.
