Dynamics of a degenerate PDE model of epitaxial crystal growth

ABSTRACT:  Epitaxial growth is an important physical process for forming solid films or
other nano-structures.  It occurs as atoms, deposited from above, adsorb and
diffuse on a crystal surface.  Modeling the rates that atoms hop and break
bonds leads in the continuum limit to degenerate 4th-order PDE that involve exponential
nonlinearity and the p-Laplacian with p=1, for example.  We discuss a number of
analytical results for such models, some of which involve subgradient dynamics
for Radon measure solutions.

HOST: Ming Chen