Equilibria and dislocations in epitaxial growth (Q515699)

The paper intends to give an overview on recent developments in the domain of epitaxial growth. A free energy functional is associated to the physical system. Let the variable \(z=(x,y)\) describe the profile of the film and the variable \(u\) the displacement of the material. A natural state for the substrate is reached at \(u=0\) and a natural state for the film is given by \(u=A_oz\), \(A_o\) being a nonzero \(2\times 2\) matrix. Together with the functional, a Dirichlet boundary condition is considered. One focuses on the variational properties of the functional. Section 2 is devoted to the existence of a solution to the stated minimum problem and Section 3, mainly, to a result on regularity of local minimizers. Further relevant local and global minimality results are presented in the fourth section. The behavior of dislocations in an elastic medium is discussed in Section 5. The paper ends with considerations on how a configuration evolves towards the equilibrium under the mechanism of surface diffusion.