A mechanism was proposed in order to accommodate the misfit between growing films and substrates. It was noted that a periodic arrangement of inclined stacking faults could, in certain cases, provide an average lattice constant with a much smaller misfit. It was shown that 2 experiments were well described by this mechanism. New experiments which involved KCl films on (100) NaCl surfaces, and old ones which involved Xe films on (111) 7 x 7 Si surfaces, required stacking faults to exist in the film in order to describe the structure of the film that was revealed by the spot profile analysis of low-energy electron diffraction data.

M.Henzler, C.Homann, U.Malaske, J.Wollschläger: Physical Review B, 1995, 52[24], R17060-2