Our group consists of J. Glimm , H. Kranzer, J. Pinezich, S. Simanca , D. Tan , F. Tangerman , and G. Vanderwoude. The initial geometry for many of our experiments is a rectangular or square hole in the plane, shown here from on top. The indicated red lines are edges and corners, which are tracked and treated specially in our front tracking simulation. Whether sharp features evolve sharply or round off is very much physics dependent. For this computation we assumed an isotropic deposition process where the efficiencies are angle independent.
Examples are chemical etching processes or low pressure processes.
As a result, the edges at the top of the hole round off, while the other remain sharp. Such efficiencies can occur for crystalline materials where a specific non orthogonal angle has maximum yield, the cutting angle. Such an efficiency results in a double well Hamiltonian. Since bifurcation is not yet automated in our code, we initialized this geometry as slightly bifurcated already, and track the result. We specifically show the initial hole, shown from below, without triangle edges as well as the etched hole, showing only the edges and curves, but not the surface.