Meandering instability of curved step edges on growth of a crystalline cone

Abstract We study the meandering instability during growth of an isolated nanostructure, a crystalline cone, consisting of concentric circular steps. The onset of the instability is studied analytically within the framework of the standard Burton–Cabrera–Frank model, which is applied to describe step flow growth in circular geometry. We derive the correction to the most unstable wavelength and show that in general it depends on the curvature in a complicated way. Only in the asymptotic limit where the curvature approaches zero the results are shown to reduce to the rectangular case. The results obtained here are of importance in estimating growth regimes for stable nanostructures against step meandering.