Beyond dynamic scaling: rare events break universality
Abstract
Surface growth driven by non-monomeric deposition has remained largely unexplored. We investigate a model based on the deposition of blobs with a power-law size distribution . We find that the critical exponents vary continuously with , recovering Kardar--Parisi--Zhang behavior only for . For , roughness scaling exhibits strong corrections and scale invariance breaks down. We show that this behavior originates from the emergence of a second dynamical length scale , corresponding to the linear size of the largest cluster, in addition to the usual correlation length . The coexistence of these two relevant scales signals the breakdown of the usual Family--Vicsek scaling. These results point to a new phenomenology of surface growth beyond the standard scale-invariant paradigm.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.01820,
title = {Beyond dynamic scaling: rare events break universality},
author = {Ulysse Marquis and Riccardo Gallotti and Marc Barthelemy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01820},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Submitted; 8 pages and 10 figures (main text and Appendix)