Surface mobility in amorphous selenium and comparison with organic molecular glasses

Surface diffusion is important for a broad range of chemical and physical processes that take place at the surfaces of amorphous solids, including surface crystallization. In this work, the temporal evolution of nanoholes is monitored with atomic force microscopy to quantify the surface dynamics of amorphous selenium. In molecular glasses, the surface diffusion coefficient has been shown to scale with the surface crystal growth rate (u_s) according to the power relation u_s ≈ D_s ^0.87. In this study, we observe that the same power law applies to surface crystallization of amorphous selenium, a representative inorganic polymer glass. Our study shows that the surface diffusion coefficient can be used to quantitatively predict surface crystallization rates in a chemically diverse range of materials.