Related papers: Understanding the intrinsic compression in polycry…
Vapor deposition on polycrystalline films can lead to staggering levels of compressive stress, exceeding even the yield strength of the films. Mysteriously, a significant part of this stress has a reversible nature: it disappears when the…
A continuum model for growth of solids is developed, considering adatom deposition, surface diffusion, and configuration dependent incorporation rate. For amorphous solids it is related to surface energy densities. The high adatom density…
The mean-field Landau-type theory is used to analyze the polarization properties of epitaxial ferroelectric thin films grown on dissimilar cubic substrates, which induce biaxial compressive stress in the film plane. The intrinsic effect of…
We propose a continuum theory to model the Mullins effect, which is ubiquitously observed in polymer composites. In the theory, the softening of the materials during the stretching process is accounted for by considering the delamination of…
We study the effects of time-dependent substrate/film temperature in the deposition of a mesoscopically thick film using a statistical model that accounts for diffusion of adatoms without lateral neighbors whose coefficients depend on an…
Morphological instability of a planar surface ([111], [011], or [001]) of an ultra-thin metal film is studied in a parameter space formed by three major effects (the quantum size effect, the surface energy anisotropy and the surface stress)…
Grain growth experiments on thin metallic films have shown the geometric and topological characteristics of the grain structure to be universal and independent of many experimental conditions. The universal size distribution, however, is…
The stability of interfaces and the mechanisms of thin film growth on semiconductors are issues of central importance in electronic devices. These issues can only be understood through detailed study of the relevant microscopic processes.…
Understanding the nucleation and growth of polycrystalline thin films is a long-standing goal. Polycrystalline films have many grains with different orientations that affect thin-film properties. Numerous studies have been done to determine…
A simple micromechanical model of polycrystalline materials is proposed, which enables us to swiftly produce grain-boundary-stress distributions induced by the uniform external loading (in the elastic strain regime). Such statistical…
Conventional polycrystalline materials acquire high levels of intrinsic mechanical stress (ranging from MPa to a few GPa) during preparation and use, but this stress decays quickly (~minutes) to small residual values (~kPa) under standard…
We investigate non-equilibrium fluctuations of a solid surface governed by the stochastic Mullins-Herring equation with conserved noise. This equation describes surface diffusion of adatoms accompanied by their exchange between the surface…
In this research, atomistic molecular dynamics simulations are combined with mesoscopic phase-field computational methods in order to investigate phase-transformation in polycrystalline Aluminum microstructure. In fact, microstructural…
A mathematical model is developed to analyze the growth/decay rate of surface perturbations of an ultrathin metal film on an amorphous substrate (SiO_{2}). The formulation combines the approach of Mullins [J. Appl. Phys. v30, 77, 1959] for…
We study the temporal growth pattern of surface fluctuations on a series of spinodally unstable polymer films where the degree of instability is controlled by the film thickness. For films in the deep spinodal region, the growth rate…
We perform a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation study of a model of thin film deposition of a two-component mixture in which the activation energy for diffusion of an adatom is additive over its nearest neighbors and in which the interactions…
Morphological properties of strained epitaxial films are examined through a mesoscopic approach developed to incorporate both the film crystalline structure and standard continuum theory. Film surface profiles and properties, such as…
We investigate two destabilization mechanisms for elastic polymer films and put them into a general framework: first, instabilities due to in-plane stress and second due to an externally applied electric field normal to the film's free…
We consider the diffusion and spreading of chainlike molecules on solid surfaces. We first show that the steep spherical cap shape density profiles, observed in some submonolayer experiments on spreading polymer films, imply that the…
Recent work demonstrates that finite-deformation nonlinear elasticity is essential in the accurate modeling of wrinkling in highly stretched thin films. Geometrically exact models predict an isola-center bifurcation, indicating that for a…