Scaling in the two-component surface growth

TL;DR

This paper investigates how binary surface growth models exhibit crossover from enhanced effective scaling exponents to KPZ universality, with crossover times increasing exponentially with interaction strength K.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of a crossover in kinetic roughening scaling behavior in a two-component growth model with Ising-like interactions, revealing the dependence on interaction strength K.

Findings

Effective scaling exponents are larger than in single-component models.

Crossover time and length scale grow exponentially with K.

Surface domain size increases with growth, following a 1/2 exponent.

Abstract

We studied scaling in kinetic roughening and phase ordering during growth of binary systems using 1+1 dimensional single-step solid-on-solid model with two components interacting via Ising-like interaction with the strength K. We found that the model exhibits crossover from the intermediate regime, with effective scaling exponents for kinetic roughening significantly larger than for the ordinary single-step growth model, to asymptotic regime with exponents of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang class. Crossover time and length are exponentially increasing with K. For a given large K, scaling with enhanced exponents is valid over many decades. The effective scaling exponents are continuously increasing with K. Surface ordering proceeds up to crossover. Average size of surface domains increases during growth with the exponent close to 1/2, the spin-spin correlation function and the distribution of domains obey scaling with the same exponent.