Changing shapes in the nanoworld

What are the mechanisms leading to the shape relaxation of three dimensional crystallites ? Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of fcc clusters show that the usual theories of equilibration, via atomic surface diffusion driven by curvature, are verified only at high temperatures. Below the roughening temperature, the relaxation is much slower, kinetics being governed by the nucleation of a critical germ on a facet. We show that the energy barrier for this step linearly increases with the size of the crystallite, leading to an exponential dependence of the relaxation time.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by Phys Rev Let

Coarsening of Surface Structures in Unstable Epitaxial Growth

We study unstable epitaxy on singular surfaces using continuum equations with a prescribed slope-dependent surface current. We derive scaling relations for the late stage of growth, where power law coarsening of the mound morphology is observed. For the lateral size of mounds we obtain $\xi \sim t^{1/z}$ with $z \geq 4$. An analytic treatment within a self-consistent mean-field approximation predicts multiscaling of the height-height correlation function, while the direct numerical solution of the continuum equation shows conventional scaling with z=4, independent of the shape of the surface current.Comment: 15 pages, Latex. Submitted to PR

Lattice Effects in Crystal Evaporation

We study the dynamics of a stepped crystal surface during evaporation, using the classical model of Burton, Cabrera and Frank, in which the dynamics of the surface is represented as a motion of parallel, monoatomic steps. The validity of the continuum approximation treated by Frank is checked against numerical calculations and simple, qualitative arguments. The continuum approximation is found to suffer from limitations related, in particular, to the existence of angular points. These limitations are often related to an adatom detachment rate of adatoms which is higher on the lower side of each step than on the upper side ("Schwoebel effect").Comment: DRFMC/SPSMS/MDN, Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Grenoble, 25 pages, LaTex, revtex style. 8 Figures, available upon request, report# UBFF30119

The process of irreversible nucleation in multilayer growth. I. Failure of the mean-field approach

The formation of stable dimers on top of terraces during epitaxial growth is investigated in detail. In this paper we focus on mean-field theory, the standard approach to study nucleation. Such theory is shown to be unsuitable for the present problem, because it is equivalent to considering adatoms as independent diffusing particles. This leads to an overestimate of the correct nucleation rate by a factor N, which has a direct physical meaning: in average, a visited lattice site is visited N times by a diffusing adatom. The dependence of N on the size of the terrace and on the strength of step-edge barriers is derived from well known results for random walks. The spatial distribution of nucleation events is shown to be different from the mean-field prediction, for the same physical reason. In the following paper we develop an exact treatment of the problem.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Growth of Patterned Surfaces

During epitaxial crystal growth a pattern that has initially been imprinted on a surface approximately reproduces itself after the deposition of an integer number of monolayers. Computer simulations of the one-dimensional case show that the quality of reproduction decays exponentially with a characteristic time which is linear in the activation energy of surface diffusion. We argue that this life time of a pattern is optimized, if the characteristic feature size of the pattern is larger than $(D/F)^{1/(d+2)}$, where $D$ is the surface diffusion constant, $F$ the deposition rate and $d$ the surface dimension.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, uses psfig; to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Analytical solution of generalized Burton--Cabrera--Frank equations for growth and post--growth equilibration on vicinal surfaces

We investigate growth on vicinal surfaces by molecular beam epitaxy making use of a generalized Burton--Cabrera--Frank model. Our primary aim is to propose and implement a novel analytical program based on a perturbative solution of the non--linear equations describing the coupled adatom and dimer kinetics. These equations are considered as originating from a fully microscopic description that allows the step boundary conditions to be directly formulated in terms of the sticking coefficients at each step. As an example, we study the importance of diffusion barriers for adatoms hopping down descending steps (Schwoebel effect) during growth and post-growth equilibration of the surface.Comment: 16 pages, REVTeX 3.0, IC-DDV-94-00

Asymptotic step profiles from a nonlinear growth equation for vicinal surfaces

We study a recently proposed nonlinear evolution equation describing the collective step meander on a vicinal surface subject to the Bales-Zangwill growth instability [O. Pierre-Louis et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. (80), 4221 (1998)]. A careful numerical analysis shows that the dynamically selected step profile consists of sloped segments, given by an inverse error function and steepening as sqrt(t), which are matched to pieces of a stationary (time-independent) solution describing the maxima and minima. The effect of smoothening by step edge diffusion is included heuristically, and a one-parameter family of evolution equations is introduced which contains relaxation by step edge diffusion and by attachment-detachment as special cases. The question of the persistence of an initially imposed meander wavelength is investigated in relation to recent experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 5 included figures. Typo in Eq.(5) corrected, section headlines added and Ref.[12] update

The effect of monomer evaporation on a simple model of submonolayer growth

We present a model for thin film growth by particle deposition that takes into account the possible evaporation of the particles deposited on the surface. Our model focuses on the formation of two-dimensional structures. We find that the presence of evaporation can dramatically affect the growth kinetics of the film, and can give rise to regimes characterized by different ``growth'' exponents and island size distributions. Our results are obtained by extensive computer simulations as well as through a simple scaling approach and the analysis of rate equations describing the system. We carefully discuss the relationship of our model with previous studies by Venables and Stoyanov of the same physical situation, and we show that our analysis is more general.Comment: 41 pages including figures, Revtex, to be published in Physical Review

Ratchet Effect in Surface Electromigration: Smoothing Surfaces by an ac Field

We demonstrate that for surfaces that have a nonzero Schwoebel barrier the application of an ac field parallel to the surface induces a net electro- migration current that points in the descending step direction. The magnitude of the current is calculated analytically and compared with Monte Carlo simulations. Since a downhill current smoothes the surface, our results imply that the application of ac fields can aid the smoothing process during annealing and can slow or eliminate the Schwoebel-barrier-induced mound formation during growth.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 4 ps figure