Stress effects on solid-state dewetting of nano-thin films

In this paper, we present a brief survey of stress effects on dewetting. For this purpose, i we develop a simple thermodynamic model to illustrate stress effects ii we study stress effects in strained-Silicon-On-Insulator (s-SOI) thin films by means of Low Energy Electron Microscopy, and Atomic Force Microscopy iii we discuss some available data. In particular, we show that while for s-SOI the strain only provides a relatively small contribution to the total driving force for dewetting, in some other cases stress can really dominate the driving force for the dewetting.