Steering-Enhanced Roughening during Metal Deposition at Grazing Incidence

It is shown that steering may have an important influence on the morphology of growing films. Steering originates from long-range attractive forces between incoming atoms and substrate atoms and leads to preferential arrival of atoms on top of islands. This phenomenon is most pronounced for grazing incidence deposition and results in significantly increased roughness of the growing film. Steering, which is expected to be generally valid but has so far been disregarded in growth studies, is illustrated for the growth of Cu/Cu(001).