Jim Lutsko

Jim Lutsko

My interests include Statistical Physics; Crystallization; Density Functional Theory, Simulation methods - particularly rare event techniques, Protein physics, Granular physics and Crystal Growth. I am based in the Physics of Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics group at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

[102] Step Crowding Effects Dampen the Stochasticity of Crystal Growth Kinetics

James F. Lutsko, Alexander E. S. Van Driessche, Miguel A. Durán-Olivencia, Dominique Maes, and Mike Sleutel, "Step Crowding Effects Dampen the Stochasticity of Crystal Growth Kinetics", Phys. Rev. Lett., 116, 15501 (2016) http://jimlutsko.github.io/files/Lutsko_PRL_2016.pdf

Abstract

Crystals grow by laying down new layers of material which can either correspond in size to the height of one unit cell (elementary steps) or multiple unit cells (macrosteps). Surprisingly, experiments have shown that macrosteps can grow under conditions of low supersaturation and high impurity density such that elementary step growth is completely arrested. We use atomistic simulations to show that this is due to two effects: the fact that the additional layers bias fluctuations in the position of the bottom layer towards growth and by a transition, as step height increases, from a 2D to a 3D nucleation mechanism.