MANIFESTATION OF TWOFOLD ANISOTROPIC DOMAIN GROWTH-KINETICS ON FOURFOLD SUBSTRATES

Strongly anisotropic domain growth is observed during phase segregatio n of a 2-dimensional silicide on Cu(001). At saturation, two degenerat e orthogonal domains interlock to fill the surface. As diffraction met hods show fourfold symmetric superlattice peaks, real space imaging an d a novel sitewise counting procedure are used to verify the presence of metastable anisotropic domain configurations. Comparison of the dom ain configurations with space filling simulations confirms anisotropic growth in a system within the X-Y universality class with cubic aniso tropy.