GROWTH OF PATTERNED SURFACES

During epitaxial crystal growth a pattern that has initially been impr inted on a surface approximately reproduces itself after the depositio n of an integer number of monolayers. Computer simulations of the one- dimensional case show that the quality of reproduction decays exponent ially with a characteristic time which is linear in the activation ene rgy of surface diffusion. We argue that this lifetime of a pattern is optimized if the characteristic feature size of the pattern is larger than (D/F)(1/(d+2)), where D is the surface diffusion constant, F the deposition rate, and d the surface dimension.