title: Morphological symmetry breaking during epitaxial growth at grazing incidence
abstract: It is shown that, in submonolayer growth at off-normal incidence, even much less than 1% of transfer from the condensation energy of the deposited atoms into adatom motion is sufficient to induce a net adatom current from the illuminated edge of a two-dimensional island to the other edges, thereby breaking the island symmetry. Such a symmetry breaking phenomenon is most pronounced for deposition at grazing incidence. Comparison between our theoretical predictions and existing experimental results confirms the general validity of the model.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996 and Solid State Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA.
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhong
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Niu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang