The role of stress and diffusion in structure formation in semiconductors

This dissertation addresses two aspects of the theory and simulation of stress-diffusion coupling in semiconductors. The first part is a study of the role of kinetics in the formation of pits in stressed thin films. The second part describes how atomic-scale calculations can be used to extract the thermodynamic and elastic properties of point-defects. For both aspects, there exists an interaction between phenomena at the atomic and macroscopic scales and the formation of both point-defects and surface features depends on the stress state of the system.