Critical behavior of roughening transitions in parity-conserving growth processes

Abstract

We investigate a class of parity-conserving solid-on-solid models which describe the growth of an interface by the deposition and evaporation of dimers. As a key feature of the models, evaporation of dimers takes place only at the edges of terraces, leading to a roughening transition between a smooth and a rough phase. We consider several variants of growth models in order to identify universal and nonuniversal properties. Moreover, a parity-conserving polynuclear growth model is proposed. All variants display the same type of universal critical behavior at the roughening transition. Because of parity-conservation, the critical behavior at the first few layers can be explained in terms of unidirectionally coupled branching annihilating random walks with even number of offspring.