Geometric Evolution Laws for Thin Crystalline Films: Modeling and Numerics

Geometrical evolution laws are widely used in continuum modeling of surface and interface motion in materials science. In this article, we first give a brief review of various kinds of geometrical evolution laws and their variational derivations, with an emphasis on strong anisotropy. We then survey some of the finite element based numerical methods for simulating the motion of interfaces focusing on the field of thin film growth. We discuss the finite element method applied to front-tracking, phase-field and level-set methods. We describe various applications of these geometrical evolution laws to materials science problems, and in particular, the growth and morphologies of thin crystalline films.