Surface Science Letters Crossover between terrace-diffusion and diffusion step-to-step on vicinal surfaces: scaling function and analytic approximations

On equilibrium vicinal surfaces with mass transport dominated by terrace-diffusion (TD), there can be crossover from TD to diffusion step-to-step (DSS) behavior for fluctuation wavelength k large compared to the step separation ‘. We show that the temporal correlation function for 180 -out-of-phase fluctuations can be written as a function of a single dimensionless variable proportional to time=‘ and present an excellent, simple approximation for this scaling function. This formulation can be used to distinguish mass transport dominated by DSS versus evaporation–condensation (attachment–detachment) limited kinetics (for which the capillary-wave characteristic time s has the same k behavior as DSS). 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 5.40.)a; 68.35.)p; 68.37.)d; 5.70.Np