Investigation of a Rayleigh-Like Instability During the Solid-State Dewetting of Single-Crystal Nickel and Palladium Films

We report the results of an investigation of the Rayleigh-like instability during the solid-state dewetting of stripe patches patterned from 30-nm-thick single-crystal Ni(100) and Pd(100) films. The stability of the dewetting lines is shown to be highly anisotropic, leading to a strong dependence of the interspacing of the dewetted particles on the crystallographic orientations of the patches. The dewetting lines are most stable against the Rayleigh-like instability in the < 011 > or the < 001 > direction, resulting in maximum interparticle spacing. The stability of the < 011 > and that of the < 001 > lines are observed to increase under the condition in which oxygen adsorption on the film's surface decreases and increases, respectively. The mean interspacing of the particles can be controlled by using artificial perturbations along the patch edges, and its dispersion is significantly narrowed in the direction in which the spontaneous wavelength is comparable to or greater than the characteristic length scale of a given artificial perturbation.