| AVS 55th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Surface Science | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session SS1+NC-WeM |
| Session: | Surface Structure and Morphology |
| Presenter: | T.L. Einstein, University of Maryland |
| Authors: | T.L. Einstein, University of Maryland A. Pimpinelli, University Blaise-Pascal, France and University of Maryland K. Kim, University of Maryland A. BHadj Hamouda, University of Maryland R. Sathiyanarayanan, University of Maryland |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
In computing terrace-width distributions on vicinal surfaces, one commonly assumes a long-range repulsion between steps as the inverse square of the step separation. In many cases there may be a different short-range interaction, or the steps might be able to locally form double-height steps (inconsistent with the fermion analogy). We show that such effects can alter the apparent strength of the interaction, leading to flawed predictions of the strength of the long-range elastic repulsion while still offering a good fit by the generalized Wigner distribution. Since these are finite-size effects, we show how to deal with this problem by measuring several misorientation angles of the vicinal surface. More generally, the range of the interaction affects the form of the distribution in a remarkable way; we discuss the limiting forms and the crossover between them. We apply these ideas to other surface phenomena, such as the distribution of capture zones in island growth. Work at UMD supported by the MRSEC, NSF Grant DMR 05-20471. Visits to UMD by AP supported by a CNRS Travel Grant.