Abstract:

We investigate a solid-on-solid model in which the interface of the deposit relaxes through a surface-diffusion process controlled by a local energy function and obeys detailed balance. We find that in the steady state the dynamic structure factor of the interface obeys scaling with exponents which, remarkably, are equal to those of the Edwards-Wilkinson model for sedimentation. Thus the interface fluctuations in two dimensions diverge only logarithmically and are therefore much smaller than those of all previously proposed models. We discuss the relevance of these results to molecular beam epitaxy.