Prof. Dionisios Margetis at the Wilson Lecture Series

Modeling homoepitaxial crystal growth: a tale of three scales

Epitaxial growth is a process in which a crystalline material is deposited on top of another one and takes on the crystalline orientation of the substrate. This talk addresses recent advances and challenges in answering the following question: How can one connect models of homoepitaxial growth or relaxation across distinct length scales? The models include: (i) atomistic master equations; (ii) nanoscale motion laws for line or point defects; and (iii) continuum laws for the surface height profile. Surface phenomena may exhibit an effective behavior dominated by microscale events. This talk will focus on these issues via selected examples.

About the speaker

Dio Margetis is a professor of Mathematics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park. After receiving the Electrical Engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, he went on to Harvard for a PhD in applied physics. He carried out postdoctoral work at Harvard and MIT, and joined the faculty at the University of Maryland in 2006. He has been a full professor since 2012. He was a recipient of an NSF Career Award, two Research and Scholarship Awards, and Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching at Maryland, and Dean's Prize for Excellence in Graduate Education by MIT. He was elected as an Ordway Distinguished Lecturer and Visitor at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on epitaxial growth, plasmonics, and quantum dynamics with the emphasis on describing the connections between models across length and time scales, from the atomistic to the continuum.