Morphological evolution of tilted grain-boundary thermal grooving by surface diffusion in bicrystal thin solid films having strong anisotropic surface Gibbs free energies

The weak solution of the Dirichlet extremum problem associated with the thermal grooving is applied for the simulation of critical grain-boundary (GB)-groove topographies, which has covered the inclined GB configuration. The simulation profiles have agreed with the experimental atomic force microscopy photographs after linewidth matching procedures and the simulations have produced very accurate mean surface diffusivities of alumina and tungsten.