Homoepitaxial growth is unstable towards the formation of pyramidal mounds when interlayer transport is reduced due to activation barriers to hopping at step edges. Simulations of a lattice model and a continuum equation show that a small amount of desorption dramatically speeds up the coarsening of the mound array, leading to coarsening exponents between 1/3 and 1/2. The underlying mechanism is the faster growth of larger mounds due to their lower evaporation rate.
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Šmilauer et al. (1999) studied this question.
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