2003/03/26 by Ajay Gopinathan, Thomas A. Witten, T. A. Witten
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Metallurgical Processes and Thermodynamics #Solidification and crystal growth phenomena #Surface and Thin Film Phenomena #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.70.041603
17 pages, 8 figures. To be submitted to Phys. Rev. B
arxiv created 2003/03/26 · openalex publication_date 2004/10/29 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Pairs of atomic scale terraces on a single crystal metal surface can be made to merge controllably under suitable conditions to yield steps of double height and width. We study the effect of various physical parameters on the formation of defects in a kinetic model of step doubling. We treat this manifestly nonequilibrium problem by mapping the model onto a 1D random sequential adsorption problem and solving this analytically. We also do simulations to check the validity of our treatment. We find that our treatment effectively captures the dynamic evolution and the final state of the surface morphology. We show that the number and nature of the defects formed is controlled by a single dimensionless parameter q . For q close to one we show that the fraction of defects rises linearly with epsilon identical with 1-q as 0.284epsilon . We also show that one can arrive at the final state faster and with fewer defects by changing the parameter with time.