Step Growth and Meandering in a Precursor-Mediated Epitaxy with Anisotropic Attachment Kinetics and Terrace Diffusion

Step meandering instability in a Burton-Cabrera-Frank (BCF)-type model for the growth of an isolated, atomically high step on a crystal surface is analyzed. It is assumed that the growth is sustained by the molecular precursors deposition on a terrace and their decomposition into atomic constituents; both processes are explicitly modeled. A strongly nonlinear evolution PDE for the shape of the step is derived in the long-wave limit and without assuming smallness of the amplitude; this equation may be transformed into a convective Cahn-Hilliard-type PDE for the step slope. Meandering is studied as a function of the precursors diffusivity and of the desorption rates of the precursors and adatoms. Several important features are identified, such as: the interrupted coarsening, "facet" bunching, and the lateral drift of the step perturbations (a traveling wave) when the terrace diffusion is anisotropic. The nonlinear drift introduces a disorder into the evolution of a step meander, which results in a pronounced oscillation of the step velocity, meander amplitude and lateral length scale in the steady-state that emerged after the coarsening was interrupted. The mean values of these characteristics are also strongly affected by the drift. Keywords: epitaxial crystal growth; step flow; meandering instability; molecular precursors; anisotropic diffusion; nonlinear pde model; convective Cahn-Hilliard equation