title: Interrupted coarsening of anisotropic step meander.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Postfach 4120, D-39016 Magdeburg, Germany.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Danker
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Pierre-Louis
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kassner
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Misbah