Effects of microstructures on mesoscopic morphological transitions in deposition growth models

Abstract

We study the influence of competing microstructure symmetries on the emergence of different morphologies during the growth by vapour deposition of thin solid films. We perform extensive numerical simulations with a minimal model that includes different microstructures, as well as thermal surface diffusion, to compute the corresponding structure zone model (SZM) and analyse, with statistical physics techniques, the details of transitional morphologies at border zones. We show that the maximum coordination number of the underlying microstructure provides a classification of the statistics of the transitional morphologies at the border between zones I (porous structures) and II (columnar faceted structures) of the SZM.