Anisotropy Effects During Unstable Step Flow Growth

Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank my supervisor Klaus Kassner for his overall support during the various stages of my Ph.D. studies. I am grateful for the pleasant working environment and many important learning opportunities. This work is the result of a fruitful collaboration with Laboratoire de Spec-trométrie Physique in Grenoble, where I spent numerous enjoyable research visits. I am indebted to Chaouqi Misbah for this opportunity and I would like to thank him for his great hospitality and many inspiring discussions. I am very grateful to Olivier Pierre-Louis for patiently explaining theoretical techniques and for many important discussions that helped to shape my understanding of step flow growth. I would also like to thank him for valuable comments on the manuscript of this thesis and for his great hospitality. I would like to thank Heike Emmerich for introducing me to the interesting field of crystal steps and for guiding me at the beginning of my Ph.D. work. My thanks go to Dorothea Erndt for invaluable help with administrative tasks and to countless former and current members of the physics department, especially Evgueni Zemskov, Peter Kohlert, and Thomas Fischaleck. I learnt quite a bit from them. I am grateful to Walfred Grambow from Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für paralleles Rechnen for managing a reliable and powerful computing environment which was indispensable for carrying out the numerical part of this work. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my family for their unending support and love. I gratefully acknowledge financial help from the Deutsche Forschungsgemein-schaft and from the French-German cooperation programme PROCOPE.