  Hetero-epitaxial growth on a strain-relief vicinal patterned substrate has
revealed unprecedented 2D long range ordered growth of uniform cobalt
nanostructures. The morphology of a Co sub-monolayer deposit on a Au(111)
reconstructed vicinal surface is analyzed by Variable Temperature Scanning
Tunneling Microscopy (VT-STM) experiments. A rectangular array of nano-dots
(3.8 nm x 7.2 nm) is found for a particularly large deposit temperature range
lying from 60 K to 300 K. Although the nanodot lattice is stable at room
temperature, this paper focus on the early stage of ordered nucleation and
growth at temperatures between 35 K and 480 K. The atomistic mechanisms leading
to the nanodots array are elucidated by comparing statistical analysis of
VT-STM images with multi-scaled numerical calculations combining both Molecular
Dynamics for the quantitative determination of the activation energies for the
atomic motion and the Kinetic Monte Carlo method for the simulations of the
mesoscopic time and scale evolution of the Co submonolayer.
