Kinetic roughening model with opposite Kardar-Parisi-Zhang nonlinearities

We introduce a model that simulates a kinetic roughening process with two kinds of particle: one follows ballistic deposition (BD) kinetics and the other restricted solid-on-solid Kim-Kosterlitz (KK) kinetics. Both of these kinetics are in the universality class of the nonlinear Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation, but the BD kinetics has a positive nonlinear constant while the KK kinetics has a negative one. In our model, called the BD-KK model, we assign the probabilities p and (1-p) to the KK and BD kinetics, respectively. For a specific value of p, the system behaves as a quasilinear model and the up-down symmetry is restored. We show that nonlinearities of odd order are relevant in this low nonlinear limit.