Scanning tunnelling microscopy was used, during growth at substrate temperatures of 500 to 800K, to study a transition from 2-dimensional island growth to step-flow growth of Si on the (100) surface. The occurrence of surface reconstruction led to a complex behavior in the transition region. In particular, a theoretically predicted transient growth mode, with an oscillatory behavior of the fractional coverages of the non-equivalent 1 x 2 and 2 x 1 reconstruction domains, was experimentally detected. A comparison of the experimental results with Monte Carlo simulations showed that the speed of bi-atomic step formation was related to growth rate-dependent sticking coefficients at step edges.

B.Voigtländer, T.Weber, P.Smilauer, D.E.Wolf: Physical Review Letters, 1997, 78[11], 2164-7