the effects of attraction or repulsion between adatoms becomes important. These interactions serve to alter the mobility of adatoms. In a crude way, figure 3 serves to show how adatoms may interact at higher coverage levels. The adatoms have no "choice" but to move to the right at first, and adjacent adatoms may block adsorption sites from one another. Intrinsic diffusion occurs on a uniform surface (e.g. lacking steps or vacancies) such as a single terrace, where no adatom traps or sources are present. This regime is often studied using field ion microscopy, wherein the terrace is a sharp sample tip on which an adparticle diffuses. Even in the case of a clean terrace the process may be influenced by non-uniformity near the edges of the terrace. Mass transfer diffusion takes place in the case where adparticle sources and traps such as kinks, steps, and vacancies are present. Instead of being dependent only on the jump potential barrier Ediff, diffusion in this regime is now also dependent on the formation energy of mobile adparticles. The exact nature of the diffusion environment therefore plays a role in dictating the diffusion rate, since the formation energy of an adparticle is different for each type of surface feature as is described in the Terrace Ledge Kink model. Anisotropy Orientational anisotropy takes the form of a difference in both diffusion rates and mechanisms at the various surface orientations of a given material. For a given crystalline material each Miller Index plane may display unique diffusion phenomena. Close packed surfaces such as the fcc (111) tend to have higher diffusion rates than the correspondingly more "open" faces of the same material such as fcc (100). Directional anisotropy refers to a difference in diffusion mechanism or rate in a particular direction on a given crystallographic plane. These differences may be a result of either anisotropy in the surface lattice (e.g. a rectangular lattice) or the presence of steps on a surface. One of the more dramatic examples of directional anisotropy is the diffusion of adatoms on channeled surfaces such as fcc (110), where diffusion along the channel is much faster than diffusion across the channel. Mechanisms Adatom diffusion Diffusion of adatoms may occur by a variety of mechanisms. The manner in which they diffuse is important as it may dictate the kinetics of movement, temperature dependence, and overall mobility of surface species, among other parameters. The