The normalizedwidth=standarddeviation of island radius/mean island radius(&sgr;r/⟨r⟩)of molecular beam epitaxy grown Ge on Si(100) coherent island quantum dot size distributions is analyzed for various deposition conditions. It is found that this width decreases as substrate temperature increases independent of deposition flux. This result is interpreted in the context of models which suppose that the energy barrier for edge atom detachment decreases with island size. The faster diffusion kinetics at higher growth temperatures allow these detached edge atoms to more rapidly find the smaller islands producing sharper island size distributions. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.