This book provides a critical assessment of the current status and the likely future directions of thin-film growth, an area of exceptional technological importance. Its emphasis is on descriptions of the atomic-scale mechanisms controlling the dynamics and thermodynamics of the morphological evolution of the growth front of thin films in diverse systems of fundamental and technological significance. The book covers most of the original and important conceptual developments made in the 1990s. The articles, written by leading experts, are arranged in five major categories -- the theoretical...

This volume contains the papers presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Kinetics of Ordering and Growth at Surfaces," held in Acquafredda di Maratea, Italy, September 18-22, 1989. The workshop's goal was to bring together theorists and experimentalists from two related fields, surface science and thin-film growth, to highlight their common interests and overcome a lack of communication between these two communities. Typically surface scientists are only concerned with the microscopic (atomic) description of solids within one monolayer of the surface. Thin-film growers are usually...