1304.5873 (Matteo Nicoli et al.)

Fragility and robustness of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class    [PDF]

Matteo Nicoli, Rodolfo Cuerno, Mario Castro

We assess the dependence on substrate dimensionality of the asymptotic scaling behavior of a whole family of equations that feature the basic symmetries of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation. Even for cases in which, as expected from universality arguments, these models display KPZ values for the critical exponents and limit distributions, their behavior deviates from KPZ scaling for increasing system dimensions. Such a fragility of KPZ universality contradicts naive expectations, and questions straightforward application of universality principles for the continuum description of experimental systems. Still, we find that the ensuing limit distributions do coincide with those of the KPZ class in one and two dimensions, demonstrating the robustness of the latter under changes of the critical exponent values.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.5873