Four Lectures on the Physics of Crystal Growth

Abstract

Several aspects of the theory of epitaxial crystal growth from atomic or molecular beams are developed from the perspective of statistical physics. Lectures are devoted to the rate equation theory of two-dimensional nucleation and its limitations; the growth of multilayer wedding cakes in the presence of strong step edge barriers; the continuum theory of mound coarsening; and growth-induced step meandering on vicinal surfaces.

Lecture notes from the 2001 Altenberg summer school. To appear in Physica A. 43 pages, 15 ps figures

References in corpus (3)

• Instability and wavelength selection during step flow growth of metal surfaces vicinal to fcc(001)
• Competing mechanisms for step meandering in unstable growth
• Spatio-temporal distribution of nucleation events during crystal growth

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Lattice gas study of thin film growth scenarios and transitions between them: Role of substrate
• Anisotropic dynamics of a vicinal surface under the meandering step instability
• Growth instability due to lattice-induced topological currents in limited mobility epitaxial growth models
• Novel surface universality classes with strong anisotropy
• A Theory of Growing Crystalline Nanorods - Mode I
• Scale decomposition of molecular beam epitaxy
• A simple non-equilibrium, statistical-physics toy model of thin-film growth
• Diffusion Boundary Condition at Surface Steps
• Driven surface diffusion with detailed balance and elastic phase transitions
• Transitions between epitaxial growth regimes: A (1+1)-dimensional kinetic Monte Carlo study