Kinetics of faceting driven by attractive step-step interactions on vicinal Si(113)

We have studied the far-from-equilibrium kinetics of faceting caused by short-ranged attractive step-step interactions on vicinal Si(113), using scanning tunneling microscopy. We show that a network of step bunches coarsens via both zipping up of the neighboring step bunches and irreversible binding events which alter the local topological configuration. A step-network model which incorporates the irreversible step-bunch-binding events yields quantitative understanding of the experimental results.