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Can one have preroughening of vicinal surfaces?

S. Prestipino, E. A. Jagla, E. Tosatti

cond-mat.stat-mecharXiv:cond-mat/9910440

Abstract

We discuss the possibility that, besides roughening, a vicinal surface could display preroughening (PR), and consider the possible mechanisms for its promotion. Within the framework of a terrace-step-kink model, it turns out that a PR transition is possible, and could be induced by a short-range repulsion between parallel kinks along the same step or on adjacent steps, or even by some kind of extended range step-step repulsion. We discuss the possible relevance of this phenomenon to the anomalous roughening behaviour recently reported for Ag(115).

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