Temperature dependent reentrant smooth growth in Ag(001) homoepitaxy

We present a scanning tunnelling microscopy investigation of homoepitaxial growth on Ag(001) in the multilayer regime. The deposition of 33 monolayers (ML) of silver at a flux of 0.075 ML s(-1), produces mound-like structures whose height, lateral distance and order change with the deposition temperature T-dep. In particular the temperature dependence of the surface roughness is characterised by a bell shape with a maximum around 200 K. The slope of the mound sides is found to increase monotonically with decreasing temperature until, for T-dep < 150 K, it saturates at a value corresponding to an average terrace width of less than two atomic spacings. The experimental measurements are compared with recent kinetic Monte Carlo simulation results on the same system and a good agreement is found. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.