DIFFUSION-CONTROLLED DEPOSITION OF A DENSE LATTICE GAS

We study the diffusion-controlled deposition of a two-dimensional hard-core lattice gas in systems where the temperature is quenched to zero not uniformly in the volume, but on the boundary only. We show that the patterns grown are inhomogeneous dense packings of tree-like clusters, which do not penetrate into each other. We present the simulation results that document the occurrence of fluctuation-induced forms of cluster-cluster screening, resulting in a decrease of the number of clusters, N, with the growth of the pattern's height h, N(h) almost-equal-to h -1/2.