Surface Properties of a Selective Dissagregation Model

TL;DR

This paper reviews the physical processes involved in surface morphology formation, focusing on growth models that produce self-affine surfaces, and discusses the classification of these models based on their scaling exponents.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of discrete and continuous growth models and their classification into universality classes based on surface scaling properties.

Findings

Self-affine surfaces characterized by scaling exponents.

Growth models classified into universality classes.

Differences in relaxation mechanisms affect surface morphology.

Abstract

There are three fundamental physical processes that gives rise to the morphology of a surface: deposition, surface diffusion and desorption. The characteristics of the interfaces generated by the combination of deposition and surface diffusion has been well studied during the past decades . In particular for growth models, particles are added to the surface and then are allowed to relax by different mechanisms. Many of this models have been shown to lead to the formation of self-affine surfaces, characterized by scaling exponents. From a theoretical point of view, the studies dedicated to the self-affine interfaces generated by growth models can be considered to follow two main branches. The studies about the properties of discrete models and the studies about continuous models. The first ones where dedicated mainly to the study of the properties of computational models in which the growth proceeds on an initially empty lattice representing a d-dimensional substrate. At each time step, the height of the lattice sites is increased by units (usually one unit) representing the incoming particles. Different models only differs on the relaxation mechanisms proposed to capture specific experimental characteristics. Then, the models are classified according to the values of the scaling exponents in several universality classes.