Interrupted coarsening of anisotropic step meander.
We report on the effect of anisotropy on the step meandering instability on vicinal surfaces during molecular beam epitaxy growth. A scenario of interrupted coarsening is found: the lateral length scale of the structure first significantly increases with time and then freezes at a larger length scale. The wavelength selection mechanism results from a nontrivial nonlinear effect of anisotropy. Anisotropy also leads to solutions which drift sideways, resulting from the loss of the back-front symmetry of the meander and the nonvariational character of dynamics.
Danker
G
G
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Postfach 4120, D-39016 Magdeburg, Germany.
Pierre-Louis
O
O
Kassner
K
K
Misbah
C
C