Anti-Coarsening and Complex Dynamics of Step Bunches on Vicinal Surfaces during Sublimation

TL;DR

This paper studies how sublimation and asymmetric kinetics cause step bunching on vicinal surfaces, revealing non-conservative effects that limit bunch size and lead to complex dynamics such as breakup and oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces a continuum model accounting for sublimation and step interactions, highlighting non-conservative effects on step bunching dynamics.

Findings

Non-conservative terms limit step bunch size.

Large bunches can break into smaller ones.

Surface exhibits oscillatory and arrested coarsening behaviors.

Abstract

A sublimating vicinal crystal surface can undergo a step bunching instability when the attachment-detachment kinetics is asymmetric, in the sense of a normal Ehrlich-Schwoebel effect. Here we investigate this instability in a model that takes into account the subtle interplay between sublimation and step-step interactions, which breaks the volume-conserving character of the dynamics assumed in previous work. On the basis of a systematically derived continuum equation for the surface profile, we argue that the non-conservative terms pose a limitation on the size of emerging step bunches. This conclusion is supported by extensive simulations of the discrete step dynamics, which show breakup of large bunches into smaller ones as well as arrested coarsening and periodic oscillations between states with different numbers of bunches.