Revisiting the Meandering Instability During Step-Flow Epitaxy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript “Revisiting the meandering instability during step-flow epitaxy” deals the step-meandering instabilities found in epitaxial growth through 2D mechanism, from a theoretical point of view.

In my opinion the manuscript, although seems very impressive from the methodological point of view results being difficult to follow if the reader is not a mathematician, which is my case –I am experimentalist-, and maybe a percentage of readers. I would like to know real cases of meandering instabilities of epitaxial growth. I have read some publications concerning epitaxy in thin films but never read about meandering. To me, there is a lack of real examples and some crystalline formulae. It would be great to see how these formulae demonstrate, even approximately, some real cases.

I have several things to comment:

Page 1, line 8-9: “Under a sufficient high temperature the thin-film epitaxial growth on the vicinal surface proceeds via the flow of steps”  

I guess it is not a matter of (only) temperature but more generally related to Thermodynamics and Kinetics.

 

Page 1, line 10: “monatomic islands can be ignored”

There must be a reason for that, right? I would suggest to mention that reason and maybe explain a bit more. To me, monatomic islands are also epitaxial when some crystallographic rules are fulfilled. I guess it is a matter of calculations in a finite order of magnitude, isn’t it?

 

Page 5, line 83-84: “It is interesting to see how the equilibrium adatom coverage Θ affects the step-meandering instability Here”.

Either Here is lowercase, or can be removed.

I do not know the number of references “needed” for a publication to be confidence but to me, 10 is not enough, and less when writing “epitaxy meandering calculations” in Google Schoolar  appear these ones (more recent than the mean of the manuscript) among others:

Hamouda, A. B., Pimpinelli, A., & Phaneuf, R. J. (2008). Anomalous scaling in epitaxial growth on vicinal surfaces: meandering and mounding instabilities in a linear growth equation with spatiotemporally correlated noise. Surface Science, 602(17), 2819-2827. Pimpinelli, A., Videcoq, A., & Vladimirova, M. (2001). Kinetic surface patterning in two-particle models of epitaxial growth. Applied surface science, 175, 55-61. DeVita, J. P., Sander, L. M., & Smereka, P. (2005). Multiscale kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm for simulating epitaxial growth. Physical Review B, 72(20), 205421. Bean, J. C. (1985). Strained-layer epitaxy of germanium-silicon alloys. Science, 230(4722), 127-131. Wagner, S., Klose, P., Burlaka, V., Nörthemann, K., Hamm, M., & Pundt, A. (2019). Structural phase transitions in niobium hydrogen thin films–mechanical stress, phase equilibria and critical temperatures. ChemPhysChem. Eliseev, E. A., Morozovska, A. N., Nelson, C. T., & Kalinin, S. V. (2019). Intrinsic structural instabilities of domain walls driven by gradient coupling: Meandering antiferrodistortive-ferroelectric domain walls in BiFe O 3. Physical Review B, 99(1), 014112.

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