%0 Journal Article
%T Nucleation and growth of metal whiskers
%A Victor Karpov
%J Physics
%D 2013
%I arXiv
%X The existence of metal whiskers is attributed to the energy gain due to electrostatic polarization of needle shaped metal filaments in the electric field induced by surface imperfections: contaminations, oxide states, etc. A proposed theory provides closed form expressions for the whisker nucleation and growth rates, explains the range of whisker parameters and effects of external biasing. It predicts a well controlled whisker growth on any metal surface via generating surface plasmon polariton excitations.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.3822v3