Critical behavior of roughening transitions in parity-conserving growth processes

TL;DR

This paper studies parity-conserving growth models with dimer deposition and evaporation, revealing universal critical behavior at the roughening transition, explained via coupled branching annihilating random walks.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes several variants of parity-conserving growth models, including a new polynuclear growth model, highlighting universal critical properties.

Findings

All variants exhibit the same universal critical behavior at the roughening transition.

Critical behavior at early layers can be explained by coupled branching annihilating random walks.

Parity conservation influences the universality class of the transition.

Abstract

We investigate a class of parity-conserving solid-on-solid models which describe the growth of an interface by the deposition and evaporation of dimers. As a key feature of the models, evaporation of dimers takes place only at the edges of terraces, leading to a roughening transition between a smooth and a rough phase. We consider several variants of growth models in order to identify universal and nonuniversal properties. Moreover, a parity-conserving polynuclear growth model is proposed. All variants display the same type of universal critical behavior at the roughening transition. Because of parity-conservation, the critical behavior at the first few layers can be explained in terms of unidirectionally coupled branching annihilating random walks with even number of offspring.