Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2010
The growth of thin solid semiconductor films is at the heart of the development of modern electronic and optical devices. A key element in strategies for nanoscale fabrication is the exploitation of growth and kinetic instabilities to form surface nanostructures and patterns with desirable functionality.
Epitaxy is a term that is commonly used for the growth of a thin solid layer on top of a substrate. Homoepitaxy denotes the growth of crystals of a material on a crystal face of the same material, while the term heteroepitaxy is used if the materials of the substrate and the growing film are different. Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) is a common experimental technique that is used to grow such solid films. A film that grows without defects is called a coherently grown film. In such a film the constituent atoms arrange themselves on top of the substrate as its natural extension. The film has the same crystal structure as the substrate.
In the epitaxial growth of a crystal film on another crystal, elasticity plays a dominant role and leads to long-range effective interactions between the adatoms on the surface. These interactions are repulsive and compete with the stronger shortrange chemical interactions. The repulsive nature of the long-range interactions can be qualitatively understood as follows. Consider a planar solid surface of a semiinfinite crystal. When an adatom is placed on this surface, its interaction with the atoms in the top layer creates a stress which changes the distance between its nearest neighbors in the top atomic layer of the surface.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.