English

Changing growth conditions during surface growth

Statistical Mechanics 2015-05-14 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

Motivated by a series of experiments that revealed a temperature dependence of the dynamic scaling regime of growing surfaces, we investigate theoretically how a nonequilibrium growth process reacts to a sudden change of system parameters. We discuss quenches between correlated regimes through exact expressions derived from the stochastic Edwards-Wilkinson equation with a variable diffusion constant. Our study reveals that a sudden change of the diffusion constant leads to remarkable changes in the surface roughness. Different dynamic regimes, characterized by a power-law or by an exponential relaxation, are identified, and a dynamic phase diagram is constructed. We conclude that growth processes provide one of the rare instances where quenches between correlated regimes yield a power-law relaxation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0912.0062,
  title  = {Changing growth conditions during surface growth},
  author = {Yen-Liang Chou and Michel Pleimling and R. K. P. Zia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.0062},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

8 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. E

R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:18:00.719Z