KINETICALLY DRIVEN GROWTH INSTABILITY IN STRESSED SOLIDS

We report a new stress-induced kinetically driven morphological instab ility for driven systems. The effect of stress on the interfacial mobi lity couples to stress variations along a perturbed planar growth fron t. Comparison of theory and experiment for solid phase epitaxy at a co rrugated Si(001) interface, with no free parameters, indicates that th e new mechanism is required to account for the observed growth of the corrugation amplitude. This mechanism operates in conjunction with kno wn diffusional and elastic strain energy-driven instabilities in deter mining morphological evolution.