On the growth orientation of twin-related faceted dendrites

The growth orientation of twin-related faceted silicon dendrites depends on the undercooling ΔT in the melt, which cannot be explained by the existing models. We propose a model to explain the growth behavior showing that the re-entrant corners would lead to the growth of 〈112〉 dendrites, while the 〈110〉 branch is due to continuous growth. Such a selection could be determined by the velocity ratio Vre-entrant/Vridge that is a function of ΔT. An analytical expression for this ratio is derived and compared to the experimental observations.

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