Kinetically driven growth instability in stressed solids

We report a new stress-induced kinetically driven morphological instability for driven systems. The effect of stress on the interfacial mobility couples to stress variations along a perturbed planar growth front. Comparison of theory and experiment for solid phase epitaxy at a corrugated Si(001) interface, with no free parameters, indicates that the new mechanism is required to account for the observed growth of the corrugation amplitude. This mechanism operates in conjunction with known diffusional and elastic strain energy-driven instabilities in determining morphological evolution.