Misfit accommodation in heteroepitaxy by inclined stacking faults

For accommodation Of the misfit between growing film and substrate an interesting mechanism is proposed. A periodic arrangement of inclined stacking faults may in certain cases provide an average lattice constant with much smaller misfit. It is shown that two experiments are well described with this mechanism. New experiments with KCl films on NaCl(100) [and old ones with Xe films on Si(111)7 x 7] require stacking faults in the film to describe the structure of the film as observed by spot profile analysis of low-energy electron diffraction.