Temperature effect on (2+1) experimental Kardar-Parisi-Zhang growth

Abstract

We report on the effect of substrate temperature (T) on both local structure and long-wavelength fluctuations of polycrystalline CdTe thin films deposited on Si(001). A strong T-dependent mound evolution is observed and explained in terms of the energy barrier to inter-grain diffusion at grain boundaries, as corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations. This leads to transitions from uncorrelated growth to a crossover from random-to-correlated growth and transient anomalous scaling as T increases. Due to these finite-time effects, we were not able to determine the universality class of the system through the critical exponents. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that this can be circumvented by analyzing height, roughness and maximal height distributions, which allow us to prove that CdTe grows asymptotically according to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation in a broad range of T. More important, one finds positive (negative) velocity excess in the growth at low (high) T, indicating that it is possible to control the KPZ non-linearity by adjusting the temperature.

6 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Growing interfaces uncover universal fluctuations behind scale invariance
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• Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class in 2+1 dimensions: Universal geometry-dependent distributions and finite-time corrections
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Initial pseudo-steady state & asymptotic KPZ universality in semiconductor on polymer deposition
• KPZ equation with short-range correlated noise: emergent symmetries and non-universal observables
• Dimensional crossover in Kardar-Parisi-Zhang growth