Stress and displacement fields of a 2-dimensional solid under plane strain were solved subject to reconstruction boundary conditions. The alternating lateral Dirac-δ forces at steps owing to the reconstruction obtained by Alerhand et alia (1988) were recovered from the gradient of the stress field solution. Sinusoidal vertical and lateral displacements on a terrace were obtained, in addition to the vertical force distribution, in the direction normal to the surface. Reconstructed periodic terraces reduced their elastic energy by increasing their average width, but the elastic energy density reached a finite limit with increasing terrace width. A like-oriented step–step interaction with the force dipole from the surface reconstruction, using the Marchenko–Parshin model, was found to be repulsive. Reconstructed terraces of a vicinal surface were thermodynamically stable when the surface had a large dangling bond energy and a large miscut angle. A low miscut angle or surface tension tended to destabilize the surface, but the results suggested that a multi-layer configuration will metastabilize terraces owing to the interface elastic mismatch.

Energetics of Steps and Reconstructed Terraces of a Two-Dimensional Semi-Infinite Solid. R.A.Budiman: Journal of Physics D, 2005, 38[16], 2830-5