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Fast coarsening in unstable epitaxy with desorption

Pavel Smilauer, Martin Rost, Joachim Krug

cond-mat.stat-mecharXiv:cond-mat/9811016

Abstract

Homoepitaxial growth is unstable towards the formation of pyramidal mounds when interlayer transport is reduced due to activation barriers to hopping at step edges. Simulations of a lattice model and a continuum equation show that a small amount of desorption dramatically speeds up the coarsening of the mound array, leading to coarsening exponents between 1/3 and 1/2. The underlying mechanism is the faster growth of larger mounds due to their lower evaporation rate.

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