Molecular Beam Epitaxy: A Thermomechanical Treatment

141 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.We perform a linear stability analysis, and consider the dependence of the growth rate of instability on the wave number. This dispersion relation is a function of many parameters that describe the elasticity and chemistry of the film and substrate. The analysis permits us to recover the classical results for Asaro-Tiller-Grinfeld instability, as well as more recent achievements predicting compositional segregation. Finally, we investigate the response of the instability towards a new chemical parameter (ratio of chemical energies of the species), and show that, under certain conditions, the instability behavior is determined by this parameter.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD