A continuum model of kinetic roughening and coarsening in thin films

We present a phenomenological continuum model of film growth based on a series expansion of the deposition flux in powers of the profile gradient, consideration of the energetics of the film-substrate interface and the enforcement of Onsager's reciprocity relations. The interfacial term, which operates at very small thicknesses, is nonconservative and breaks the +/-h symmetry of the remaining terms in the kinetic equation. By virtue of this term, very thin hat films are predicted to be stable within an appropriate range of parameters, and to loose stability and become rough at a well-defined critical thickness. This instability effectively provides an island nucleation mechanism. For thick films, the rate processes envisioned in the model favor a characteristic slope for the film profile, a feature which is in keeping with observation for a number of systems including YBCO films. The enforcement of reciprocity ensures the existance of a kinetic potential and enables the use of direct methods of the calculus of variations: Within this framework, we provide an explicit construction for the coarsening of the film profile based on a sharp interface approximation. The construction predicts characteristic exponents for the evolution of grain size and film roughness which are in close agreement with the observational evidence for YBCO. The predictions of the construction are also born out by numerical tests. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.