Modeling the competition between elastic and plastic relaxation in semiconductor heteroepitaxy: From cyclic growth to flat films

We introduce a continuum model of deposition and surface diffusion tackling semiconductor heteroepitaxy also in the presence of misfit dislocations. During the evolution defects are inserted on the fly whenever their presence lowers the energy of the system, and the corresponding stress field is added to the one produced by lattice mismatch. An application to Ge/Si is provided. The wealth of qualitatively different behaviors experimentally reported in the literature is reproduced.