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Updated: Aug 7, 2026

Determination of Aggregate Surface Morphology at the Interfacial Transition Zone (ITZ)
Published on: December 16, 2019
Strongly anisotropic roughness in surfaces driven by an oblique particle flux
B Schmittmann1, Gunnar Pruessner, Hans-Karl Janssen
1Center for Stochastic Processes in Science and Engineering, Department of Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0435, USA. schmittm@vt.edu
Abstract:
Using field theoretic renormalization, an MBE-type growth process with an obliquely incident influx of atoms is examined. The projection of the beam on the substrate plane selects a "parallel" direction, with rotational invariance restricted to the transverse directions. Depending on the behavior of an effective anisotropic surface tension, a line of second-order transitions is identified, as well as a line of potentially first-order transitions, joined by a multicritical point. Near the second-order transitions and the multicritical point, the surface roughness is strongly anisotropic. Four different roughness exponents are introduced and computed, describing the surface in different directions, in real or momentum space. The results presented challenge an earlier study of the multicritical point.
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