Morphologies and kinetics of a dewetting ultrathin solid film

Abstract

The surface evolution model based on a geometric partial differential equation is used to numerically study the kinetics of dewetting and the dynamic morphologies for the localized pinhole defect in the surface of an ultrathin solid film with the strongly anisotropic surface energy. Depending on the parameters such as the initial depth and width of the pinhole, the strength of the attractive substrate potential and the strength of the surface-energy anisotropy, the pinhole may either extend to the substrate and thus rupture the film, or evolve to the quasiequilibrium shape while the rest of the film surface undergoes a phase separation into a hill-and-valley structure followed by coarsening. Emergence of the quasiequilibrium shape and the termination of a dewetting are associated with the faceting of the pinhole tip. Overhanging ͑nongraph͒ morphologies are possible for deep, narrow ͑slitlike͒ pinholes.

A review of wetting versus adsorption, complexions, and related phenomena: the rosetta stone of wetting

“…where R is the grain size, and b is defined in terms the grain boundary (c GB ) and surface (c SV ) energies as b ¼ sin À1 c GB =c SV ð Þ [82,83,89,90]. This model ignores the influence of the film-substrate interfacial energy, and if the interfacial energy is relatively high and a mechanism exists for nucleation of voids at the interface, then voids will first form at the interface, and grow towards the surface [91,92].…”

Analysis of a combined influence of substrate wetting and surface electromigration on a thin film stability and dynamical morphologies

“…(Note again that z here stands for the shortest distance between the substrate and a chosen point (x, z) on a film surface; this distance is the height h(x, t) of the surface if there is no overhangs.) In this paper we focus on the effects due to anisotropic adatom mobility, thus we will use the simpler isotropic model for the surface energy [22]- [35]:…”

Stability of a strongly anisotropic thin epitaxial film in a wetting interaction with elastic substrate

“…To this end, by combining expressions derived by us in Refs. [9,25] we state the dimensionless linear growth rate in the longwave limit, kh 0 ≪ 1 (where k is the perturbation wavenumber and h 0 is the uniform thickness of unperturbed planar film):…”