Changing growth conditions during surface growth

TL;DR

This paper investigates how sudden changes in system parameters affect the surface roughness during nonequilibrium surface growth, revealing diverse relaxation behaviors and constructing a dynamic phase diagram.

Contribution

It provides an exact theoretical analysis of quenches in the Edwards-Wilkinson model with variable diffusion, highlighting the impact on surface roughness and relaxation dynamics.

Findings

Sudden changes in diffusion constant cause significant surface roughness variations.

Identifies power-law and exponential relaxation regimes after parameter quenches.

Constructs a dynamic phase diagram for growth process responses.

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.