Asymptotic step profiles from a nonlinear growth equation for vicinal surfaces
Abstract
We study a recently proposed nonlinear evolution equation describing the collective step meander on a vicinal surface subject to the Bales-Zangwill growth instability [O. Pierre-Louis et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. (80), 4221 (1998)]. A careful numerical analysis shows that the dynamically selected step profile consists of sloped segments, given by an inverse error function and steepening as sqrt(t), which are matched to pieces of a stationary (time-independent) solution describing the maxima and minima. The effect of smoothening by step edge diffusion is included heuristically, and a one-parameter family of evolution equations is introduced which contains relaxation by step edge diffusion and by attachment-detachment as special cases. The question of the persistence of an initially imposed meander wavelength is investigated in relation to recent experiments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0005376,
title = {Asymptotic step profiles from a nonlinear growth equation for vicinal surfaces},
author = {J. Kallunki and J. Krug},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0005376},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 5 included figures. Typo in Eq.(5) corrected, section headlines added and Ref.[12] updated