It is proposed that surfaces of crystals that reconstruct with broken orientational symmetry and exhibit an anisotropic stress tensor are unstable to the formation of elastic stress domains. The ground state of such a surface is not uniform, but corresponds to a mosaic pattern of the different domains. This result is applied together with microscopic calculations of surface stress to study the Si(100) surface. A structural transition from single-layer to double-layer steps for vicinal Si(100) surfaces is also studied.
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Vanderbilt et al. (1989) studied this question.