Effect of surface energy anisotropy on Rayleigh-like solid-state dewetting and nanowire stability

The process of solid-state dewetting of Au thin films studied by in situ scanning transmission electron microscopy

“…The remarkable stability of the interconnect might be related to the incident that none of the two adjacent islands is clearly energetically favored (similar size, no clear orientation, multiple grains, no pronounced faceting). An intrinsic stability of the thin connections can be related to faceting due to surface energy anisotropy, making them stable against perturbations [70][71][72]. Further investigations on the phenomenon of these thin and straight connections will have to be performed to elucidate their nature and the role they play in dewetting as paths for mass transport.…”

Sharp-interface approach for simulating solid-state dewetting in two dimensions: A Cahn–Hoffman ξ-vector formulation

“…Introduction. Driven by capillarity effects, solid thin films sitting on a substrate are rarely stable and could exhibit complex morphological changes, e.g., faceting [28,29,60], edge retraction [58,13,61,62,32], pinch-off [23,31], fingering instabilities [30,10,18] and so on. This phenomenon, known as solid-state dewetting [54], has been widely observed in many thin film/substrate systems [28,29,32,48].…”

Efficient Photocatalytic H2 Evolution: Controlled Dewetting–Dealloying to Fabricate Site‐Selective High‐Activity Nanoporous Au Particles on Highly Ordered TiO2 Nanotube Arrays

“…[18] The morphology of the dewetted particles is strongly influenced by different parameters, which are precisely the metal film thickness, the film homogeneity, the dewetting atmosphere, the substrate morphology and its chemical nature. [12,15,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] In general, the locations at which a thin metal film brake up (i.e., "hole formation") are random, but this process can be site-controlled by adopting regularly patterned substrate topographies.…”