THE GROWTH OF ROUGH SURFACES AND INTERFACES

This review describes some of the progress that has been made, during the past decade, towards the goal of developing a systematic understanding of the formation of rough surfaces. Attention is focused on the growth of surfaces and interfaces under far from equilibrium conditions. It is becoming apparent that the asymptotic behavior associated with many of these phenomena can be understood in terms of a few continuum equations that describe the evolution of surface profiles on long length scales. These equations provide the basis for describing surface growth in terms of universality classes. Typically the evolution equations are non-linear stochastic equations that pose serious theoretical challenges of their own. The main emphasis in this review is on computer simulations and experiments. The use of fractal geometry and scaling concepts to analyze experiments or simulations and make detailed comparisons with theoretical developments is demonstrated.