Rippling instability on surfaces of stressed crystalline conductors

We report a surface morphological stability analysis for stressed, conducting crystalline solids without and with the simultaneous application of an electric field based on self-consistent dynamical simulations according to a fully nonlinear model. The analysis reveals that in addition to a cracklike surface instability, a very-long-wavelength instability may be triggered that leads to the formation of secondary ripples on the surface morphology. We demonstrate that the number of ripples formed scales linearly with the wavelength of the initial perturbation from the planar surface morphology and that a sufficiently strong electric field inhibits both the cracklike and the rippling instability.