Condensed Matter Physics Seminar
Friday, March 5 1999, 2 p.m.
Plant Sciences Building, Room 1130
Surface Growth and Fluid Turbulence: Intermittent Interfaces?
Sankar Das Sarma
(University of Maryland)
Abstract: Thin film growth via vapor deposition (e.g. MBE growth)
is an important technological process whose fundamental theoretical understanding
is lacking at the present time. In this talk I will discuss a nonequilibrium
statistical mechanical approach toward understanding MBE growth using large-scale
computer simulations and analytical renormalization group techniques.
The dynamical surface growth morphology exhibits nontrivial structures
whose statistical properties have striking formal similarities to the problem
of fully developed isotropic turbulence in fluids. Both problems show similar
anomalous scaling, intermittency, and multifractal behavior arising from
dynamical nonlinearities inherent in their coarse-grained descriptions.
The talk will mostly be simulational results and lots of pictures with
a little theory (and hopefully understanding) sprinkled in.
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