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Concave-corner-mediated self-organized crystal growth

Mu Wang 

National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Department of Physics, Nanjing University (NJU), Hankou Road 22#, Nanjing 210093, China

Abstract

In lateral growth of a crystalline layer on a foreign substrate, by successive nucleation at the concave corner of crystal facet and substrate, consecutive rotation of crystallographic orientation of the crystalline layer can be observed. Such a consecutive rotation of crystallographic orientation may lead to a number of effects, such as the spatial periodic faceting-roughening transitions and regular zigzag growth (Consecutive rotation of crystallographic orientation in lateral growth, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 125505 (2005); Fractal aggregations at low driving force with strong anisotropy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 3089 (1998); Nucleation-mediated lateral growth on foreign substrate, J. Phys. Chem. C, 111, 1071-1075 (2007)). The physical origin of these effects is the imbalance of surface/interface tensions at the concave corner, which deforms the embryo of nucleus at the concave corner and changes the crystallographic orientation layer-by-layer. A theoretical model is provided, which predicts a criterion to observe such an effect in the nucleation-mediated lateral growth. The theoretical expectations are consistent with the experimental observations. The corner-mediated growth may also contribute to the unexpected pattern formation of hierarchical windmill structure of ZnO (Microscopic view of the role of repeated polytypism in self-organization of hierarchical nanostructures, Phys. Rev. B87, 085306 (2013)). This effect can be applied further to generate regular nanosized metallic wire arrays (Creating in-plane metallic-nanowire arrays by corner-mediated electrodeposition, Adv. Mater.,21, 3576 (2009)).

 

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Presentation: Invited oral at 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - ICCGE-17, General Session 1, by Mu Wang
See On-line Journal of 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy - ICCGE-17

Submitted: 2013-05-03 05:22
Revised:   2013-05-03 05:22