On the stability of low anisotropy dendrites

Overview & Synopsis

We point out that the growth of dendritic sidebranches, when viewed as the propagation of a front into the Mullins-Sekerka unstable needle crystal profile, leads one to expect sidebranches to encroach on the tip, at least transiently, in the limit of small kinetic or surface tension anisotropy. We show that this view point can be reconciled with the Zel'dovich-like description of perturbations and suggest how the importance of these effects for real dentrites could be probed experimentally.