Related papers: New mechanism for impurity-induced step bunching

Bacteria often traverse confined spaces to perform critical functions in symbiosis, infection, drug delivery, and soil bioremediation. While the canonical run-and-tumble strategy enables exploration, its reliance on constant sensing and…

The self-assembly of molecules at surfaces can be caused by a range of physical mechanisms. Assembly can be driven by intermolecular forces, or molecule-surface forces, or both; it can result in structures that are in equilibrium or that…

We study the dynamics of island nucleation in the presence of adsorbates using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of a two-species growth model. Adatoms (A-atoms) and impurities (B-atoms) are codeposited, diffuse and aggregate subject to…

Numerous cell-types have shown a remarkable ability to detect and move along gradients in stiffness of an underlying substrate -- a process known as durotaxis. The mechanisms underlying durotaxis are still unresolved, but generally believed…

Long-ranged step-step attractions destabilize the vicinal crystal surfaces. Their competition with shorter-ranged step-step repulsions results in self-organized patterns. The exponent in the time-scaling of their characteristic size is…

We study the effect of impurities in a supersolid phase in comparison to the behavior in the solid and superfluid phases. A supersolid phase has been established for interacting hardcore bosons on a triangular lattice which may be…

Many biological active agents respond to gradients of environmental cues by redirecting their motion. Besides the well-studied prominent examples such as photo- and chemotaxis, there has been considerable recent interest in topotaxis, i.e.\…

We explore the ground-state properties of a single impurity immersed in a one-dimensional quantum droplet medium formed by a two-component Bose mixture. Relying on ab-initio simulations, we demonstrate that tuning the impurity-droplet…

Durotaxis motion is a spectacular phenomenon manifesting itself by the autonomous motion of a nano-object between parts of a substrate with different stiffness. This motion usually takes place along a stiffness gradient from softer to…

We consider a simple model for the growth of isolated steps on a vicinal crystal surface. It incorporates diffusion and drift of adatoms on the terrace, and strong step and kink edge barriers. Using a combination of analytic methods and…

Enhancing the mechanical properties of amorphous solids is crucial for material design, with microalloying being a common but not well-understood method. Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the effect of impurity…

This is a review of recent theoretical work on complex dynamical behavior of steps on crystal surfaces. The first part of the article is devoted to the electromigration-driven motion of islands and voids, and the second part addresses step…

We study a minimal stochastic model of step bunching during growth on a one-dimensional vicinal surface. The formation of bunches is controlled by the preferential attachment of atoms to descending steps (inverse Ehrlich-Schwoebel effect)…

The planar front of a growing a crystal is often destroyed by instabilities. In the case of growth from a condensed phase, the most frequent ones are diffusion instabilities, which will be but briefly discussed in simple terms in chapter…

Recently created self-bound quantum droplets of binary Bose mixtures open intriguing possibilities for the study of impurity physics. We show that the properties of impurities embedded in quasi-one-dimensional droplets are determined by the…

Inhomogeneities in deposition may lead to formation of rough surfaces, whose height fluctuations can be probed directly by scanning microscopy, or indirectly by scattering. Analytical or numerical treatments of simple growth models suggest…

We consider the growth of a vicinal crystal surface in the presence of a step-edge barrier. For any value of the barrier strength, measured by the length l_es, nucleation of islands on terraces is always able to destroy asymptotically…

We consider the effect of nucleation on a one-dimensional stepped surface, finding that step-flow growth is metastable for any strength of the additional step-edge barrier. The surface is made unstable by the formation of a critical…

We study current-induced step bunching and wandering instabilities with subsequent pattern formations on vicinal surfaces. A novel two-region diffusion model is developed, where we assume that there are different diffusion rates on terraces…

A system of coupled chaotic bistable maps on a lattice with randomly distributed impurities is investigated as a model for studying the phenomenon of phase growth in nonuniform media. The statistical properties of the system are…