The role of the non-linearity in controlling the surface roughness in the one-dimensional Kardar–Parisi–Zhang growth process

Abstract

We explore linear control of the one-dimensional non-linear Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) equation with the goal to understand the effects the control process has on the dynamics and on the stationary state of the resulting stochastic growth kinetics. In linear control, the intrinsic non-linearity of the system is maintained at all times. In our protocol, the control is applied to only a small number n c of Fourier modes. The stationary-state roughness is obtained analytically in the small-n c regime with weak non-linear coupling wherein the controlled growth process is found to result in Edwards–Wilkinson dynamics. Furthermore, when the non-linear KPZ coupling is strong, we discern a regime where the controlled dynamics shows scaling in accordance to the KPZ universality class. We perform a detailed numerical analysis to investigate the controlled dynamics subject to weak as well as strong non-linearity. A first-order perturbation theory calculation supports the simulation results in the weak non-linear regime. For strong non-linearity, we find a temporal crossover between KPZ and dispersive growth regimes, with the crossover time scaling with the number n c of controlled Fourier modes. We observe that the height distribution is positively skewed, indicating that as a consequence of the linear control, the surface morphology displays fewer and smaller hills than in the uncontrolled growth process, and that the inherent size-dependent stationary-state roughness provides an upper limit for the roughness of the controlled system.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 23, 2021
Source ID
10.1088/1751-8121/abe753

Entities

People

  • Michel Pleimling
  • Priyanka
  • Uwe C. Täuber

Organizations

  • Army Research Office

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Control Systems Engineering.
  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.