Roughening transition in a model for dimer adsorption and desorption

A solid-on-solid growth model for dimer adsorption and desorption is introduced and studied numerically. The special property of the model is that dimers can desorb only at the edges of terraces. It is shown that the model exhibits a roughening transition from a smooth to a rough phase. In both phases the interface remains pinned to the bottom layer and does not propagate. Close to the transition certain critical properties are related to those of a unidirectionally coupled hierarchy of parity-conserving branching-annihilating random walks. [S0031-9007(98)08343-4].