ABSTRACT
In present day nanotechnology, surface structures are effectively
made via natural processes instead of conventional carving meth-
ods. We show that the emergence of different surface patterns can
be understood by suitable mapping onto the simple nonequilibrium
lattice gases. Surface adsorption/desorption processes correspond
to migration of oriented dimers representing local heights. The
surface diffusion can be mapped onto attracting or repelling moves
of dimers of the lattice. While attracting dimer moves describe
roughening surfaces, repulsive ones realize smoothing processes.
The competition of these different reactions leads to nontrivial
surface pattern formation. With the help of this effective approach,
difficult unanswered questions of surface growth and scaling can
be investigated and have been resolved. Besides, the mapping
onto binary variables facilitates effective simulations and enables
us to consider very large system sizes. We have shown that
the fundamental Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class is stable
against a competing roughening diffusion. A strong smoothing
diffusion leads to logarithmic growth and mean-field class scaling
behavior in two dimensions. These lattice gas simulations result in
ripple coarsening, if parallel surface currents are present, otherwise
logarithmic behavior can be observed.
