The stochastic porous medium equation in one dimension

Abstract

We study the porous medium equation (PME) in one space dimension in presence of additive non-conservative white noise, and interpreted as a stochastic growth equation for the height field of an interface. We predict the values of the two growth exponents $\alpha$ and $\beta$ using the functional RG. Extensive numerical simulations show agreement with the predicted values for these exponents, however they also show anomalous scaling with an additional "local" exponent $\alpha_{\rm loc}$, as well as multiscaling originating from broad distributions of local height differences. The stationary measure of the stochastic PME is found to be well described by a random walk model, related to a Bessel process. This model allows for several predictions about the multiscaling properties.