Stabilization by rough noise for an epitaxial growth model

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that even minimal space-time white noise can stabilize an epitaxial growth model by eliminating nonlinear interactions, counteracting hill formation, and suggesting noise-induced stabilization in thin-film growth processes.

Contribution

It reveals that small stochastic fluctuations can suppress nonlinearities and stabilize epitaxial growth models, a novel insight into noise effects in surface evolution.

Findings

White noise eliminates nonlinear interactions

Noise stabilizes the growth dynamics

Suppression of hill formation in the model

Abstract

In this article we study a model from epitaxial thin-film growth. It was originally introduced as a phenomenological model of growth in the presence of a Schwoebbel barrier, where diffusing particles on a terrace are not allowed to jump down at the boundary. Nevertheless, we show that the presence of arbitrarily small space-time white noise due to fluctuations in the incoming particles surprisingly eliminates all nonlinear interactions in the model and thus has the potential to stabilize the dynamics and suppress the growth of hills in these models.