Preroughening is shown to be an effective means of reducing nucleation barriers for growth or etching on surfaces. Preroughening may be more common than previously anticipated. The nature of surfaces in crystals with non-trivial crystal structures is still an open question in surface science. Such fundamental knowledge is of particular interest in semiconductor device fabrication. Only nearest-neighbor interactions are used, and reconstruction effects are excluded, in order to focus on fundamental effects due to the crystal structure.
Prerough surfaces look atomically rough, but remain macroscopically faceted.
Preroughening is shown to be an effective means of reducing nucleation barriers for growth or etching on surfaces. The peak height scales with linear system size L as L1.24. J is the nearest-neighbor bond strength. All rights reserved.