It is important to investigate the growth dynamics of Ge adatoms under different surface stress regimes of the patterned dielectric to control the selective growth of self-assembled Ge nanostructures on silicon. In the present work, we have studied the growth of Ge by molecular beam epitaxy on nanometer scale patterned Si3N4/Si(001) substrates generated using electron beam lithography. The pitch of the patterns has been varied to investigate its effect on the growth of Ge in comparison to un-patterned Si3N4. For the patterned Si3N4 film, Ge did not desorbed completely from the Si3N4 film and hence no site selective growth pattern is observed. Instead, depending upon the pitch, Ge growth has occurred in different growth modes around the openings in the Si3N4. For the un-patterned substrate, the morphology exhibits the occurrence of uniform 3D clustering of Ge adatoms on Si3N4 film. This variation in the growth modes of Ge is attributed to the variation of residual stress in the Si3N4 film for different pitch of holes, which has been confirmed theoretically through Comsol Multiphysics simulation. The variation in stress for different pitches resulted in modulation of surface energy of the Si3N4 film leading to the different growth modes of Ge. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.