Sun L D, Hohage M, Zeppenfeld P, Balderas-Navarro R E, Hingerl K
Institut für Experimentalphysik, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, A-4040 Linz, Austria.
Phys Rev Lett. 2006 Jan 13;96(1):016105. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.016105. Epub 2006 Jan 5.
We show that reflectance difference spectroscopy (RDS) is sensitive to the inhomogeneous surface and thin film strain which builds up during hetero- and homoepitaxial growth. The RDS signal is affected by the local, mean square atomic displacements in the substrate resulting from the stress relaxation of strained adlayer islands. For layer-by-layer growth an oscillatory variation of the RDS intensity is observed. These results demonstrate the potentiality of RDS to probe the growth kinetics on structurally anisotropic surfaces.
