Critical behavior of roughening transitions in parity-conserving growth processes

We investigate a class of parity-conserving solid-on-solid models that describes 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 an even number of offspring.