Influence of microstructure on the transitions between mesoscopic thin-film morphologies in ballistic-diffusive...

We study the influence of the symmetries of competing microstructures on the emergence of different mesoscopic morphologies in the growth by vapor deposition of thin solid films. We show the results of numerical simulations in (1+1) - and (2+1) -dimensional systems including different microstructures, as well as thermally activated surface diffusion in combination with a ballistic algorithm to model the deposition process. We focus on the characterization of the transitional structures that appear in the empirical structure zone model (SZM) through the evaluation of the mean packing density and the mean coordination number. We show that the maximum coordination number of the underlying microstructure classifies the statistics of the transitional morphologies at the border between zone I in the SZM, characterized by the formation of fractal-like patterns, and zone II, where pronounced faceting develops. We analyze the appearance of lattice frustration and texture competition effects in complex microstructures having mutually exclusive symmetries.