Interrupted coarsening of anisotropic step meander

We report on the effect of anisotropy on the step meandering instability on vicinal surfaces during molecular beam epitaxy growth. A scenario of interrupted coarsening is found: the lateral length scale of the structure first significantly increases with time and then freezes at a larger length scale. The wavelength selection mechanism results from a nontrivial nonlinear effect of anisotropy. Anisotropy also leads to solutions which drift sideways, resulting from the loss of the back-front symmetry of the meander and the nonvariational character of dynamics.