Surface chemical potential and current-density maps during annealing

Abstract

A method is described to determine maps of surface chemical potential and current density on dynamic surfaces directly from discrete kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. It can be applied everywhere on the surface including the neighborhood of steps. The technique is used to investigate the decay of a bidirectional sinusoidal profile below the roughening temperature. For diffusion-limited kinetics driven by atom detachment and terrace diffusion, simulations indicate that the current density is proportional to the gradient of the chemical potential even with a cusp in the surface free energy.