ANISOTROPIC COARSENING OF PERIODIC GROOVES - TIME-RESOLVED X-RAY-SCATTERING

Coarsening dynamics of mesoscopic periodic grooves (500-1500 Angstrom) is characterized, as they self-assemble on a miscut Si(113) surface, following a temperature quench through a faceting transformation. Use of an area detector in glancing angle reflection geometry allowed for simultaneous measurements of highly anisotropic length scales. Over mo re than two decades of time, the length of the grooves grows as the th ird power of the width of the grooves. This result constitutes a direc t confirmation of a recently proposed theory and the observation of an isotropic dynamic scaling behavior.