Mound formation in surface growth under shadowing

In this paper we report on the morphological evolution of thin films grown by commonly employed deposition techniques, such as sputtering and chemical vapor deposition. In these deposition techniques, an angular distribution of incident particle flux leads to the shadowing effect, which often plays an important role in defining the growth front morphology. We show both by simulations and experiments that a mounded structure can be formed with a characteristic length scale, or wavelength lambda, which describes the separation of the mounds. We also show that the temporal evolution of lambda is distinctly different from that of the mound size or lateral correlation length xi. The wavelength grows as a function of time in a power-law form, lambda similar to t(p), where p approximate to 0.5 for a wide range of growth conditions, while the mound size grows as xi similar to t(1/z), where 1/z varies depending on growth conditions. The existence of these two length scales and their different growth rates leads to a breakdown of the self-affine and dynamic scaling hypotheses that have been used to describe many surface growth phenomena in the past.