Diffusion-limited aggregation with polygon particles

TL;DR

This study investigates how particle shape affects the morphology of diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) in two dimensions, finding that shape influences local structure but not the overall fractal pattern.

Contribution

It introduces off-lattice 2D DLA simulations with various polygonal particles and compares their effects on aggregate morphology, revealing shape impacts local but not global structure.

Findings

Different polygon shapes alter local compactness.

Global fractal structure remains unaffected by particle shape.

Local structure varies with the number of polygon edges.

Abstract

Diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) assumes that particles perform pure random walk at a finite temperature and aggregate when they come close enough and stick together. Although it is well known that DLA in two dimensions results in a ramified fractal structure, how the particle shape influences the formed morphology is still unclear. In this work, we perform the off-lattice two-dimensional DLA simulations with different particle shapes of triangle, quadrangle, pentagon, hexagon, and octagon, respectively, and compared with the results for circular particles. Our results indicate that different particle shapes only change the local structure, but have no effects on the global structure of the formed fractal cluster. The local compactness decreases as the number of polygon edges increases.