A thin film is a layer of materials ranging from fractions of a nanometer (monolayer) to several micrometers in thickness. The controlled synthesis of materials as thin films (a process referred to as deposition) is a fundamental step in many applications. A familiar example is the household mirror, which typically has a thin metal coating on the back of a sheet of glass to form a reflective interface. The process of silvering was once commonly used to produce mirrors, while more recently the metal layer is deposited using techniques such as sputtering. Advances in thin film deposition techniques during the 20th century have enabled a wide range of technological breakthroughs in areas such as magnetic recording media, electronic semiconductor devices, integrated passive devices, light-emitting diodes, optical coatings (such as antireflective coatings), hard coatings on cutting tools, and for both energy generation (e.g. thin-film solar cells) and storage (thin-film batteries). It is also being applied to pharmaceuticals, via thin-film drug delivery. A stack of thin films is called a multilayer.

In addition to their applied interest, thin films play an important role in the development and study of materials with new and unique properties. Examples include multiferroic materials, and superlattices that allow the study of quantum phenomena.

Nucleation is an important step in growth that helps determine the final structure of a thin film. Many growth methods rely on nucleation control such as atomic-layer epitaxy (atomic layer deposition). Nucleation can be modeled by characterizing surface process of adsorption, desorption, and surface diffusion.

Adsorption is the interaction of a vapor atom or molecule with a substrate surface. The interaction is characterized by the sticking coefficient, the fraction of incoming species thermally equilibrated with the surface. Desorption reverses adsorption where a previously adsorbed molecule overcomes the bounding energy and leaves the substrate surface.

The two types of adsorptions, physisorption and chemisorption, are distinguished by the strength of atomic interactions. Physisorption describes the van der Waals bonding between a stretched or bent molecule and the surface characterized by adsorption energy ${\displaystyle E_{p}}$. Evaporated molecules rapidly lose kinetic energy and reduces its free energy by bonding with surface atoms. Chemisorption describes the strong electron transfer (ionic or covalent bond) of molecule with substrate atoms characterized by adsorption energy ${\displaystyle E_{c}}$. The process of physic- and chemisorption can be visualized by the potential energy as a function of distance. The equilibrium distance for physisorption is further from the surface than chemisorption. The transition from physisorbed to chemisorbed states are governed by the effective energy barrier ${\displaystyle E_{a}}$.

Crystal surfaces have specific bonding sites with larger ${\displaystyle E_{a}}$ values that would preferentially be populated by vapor molecules to reduce the overall free energy. These stable sites are often found on step edges, vacancies and screw dislocations. After the most stable sites become filled, the adatom-adatom (vapor molecule) interaction becomes important.

Nucleation kinetics can be modeled considering only adsorption and desorption. First consider case where there are no mutual adatom interactions, no clustering or interaction with step edges.

The rate of change of adatom surface density ${\displaystyle n}$, where ${\displaystyle J}$ is the net flux, ${\displaystyle \tau _{a}}$ is the mean surface lifetime prior to desorption and ${\displaystyle \sigma }$ is the sticking coefficient: