Effect of strain on surface diffusion and nucleation

The influence of strain on diffusion and nucleation has been studied by means of scanning tunneling microscopy and effective-medium theory for Ag self-diffusion on strained and unstrained (111) surfaces. Experimentally, the diffusion barrier is observed to be substantially lower on a pseudomorphic Ag monolayer on Pt(111), 60 meV, compared to that on Ag(111), 97 meV. The calculations show that this strong effect is due to the 4.2% compressive strain of the Ag monolayer on Pt. It is shown that in general isotropic two-dimensional strain as well as its relief via dislocations have a drastic effect on surface diffusion and nucleation in heteroepitaxy and are thus of significance for the film morphology in the kinetic growth regime

Anisotropic corner diffusion as origin for dendritic growth on hexagonal substrates

Ag aggregation on Ag(111), Pt(111), and 1 ML Ag pseudomorphically grown on Pt(111), has been studied with variable temperature STM. These systems all have in common that dendritic patterns with trigonal symmetry rather than randomly ramified aggregates, which would be expected for a simple hit and stick mechanism, form. Dendrites are characterized by preferential growth in the [2]-directions, i.e., perpendicular to A-steps. The key process for their formation has been found to be diffusion of one-fold comer atoms towards neighboring steps. Calculations with the effective medium theory show that this relaxation is highly asymmetric with respect to the two different kinds of close-packed steps. It leads to dendritic growth as verified by kinetic Monte-Carlo simulations which agree well with experiment