Glassy Roughness of a Crystalline Surface Upon a Disordered Substrate

Abstract

The discrete Gaussian model for the surface of a crystal deposited on a disordered substrate is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. A continuous transition is found from a phase with a thermally-induced roughness to a glassy one in which the roughness is driven by the disorder. The behavior of the height-height correlations is consistent with the one-step replica symmetry broken solution of the variational approximation. The results differ from the renormalization group predictions and from recent simulations of a 2D vortex-glass model which belongs to the same universality class.