L-2

Stochastic Interfaces and growth processes

The physical properties of many materials are controlled by the interfaces embedded in it. This is the case of the dislocations in a crystal, the domain walls in a ferromagnet or the vortices in a supercoductors. In the next lecture we will discuss how impurities affect the behviour of these interfaces. Today we focus on thermal fluctuations and introduce two important equations for the interface dynamics: the Edward Wilkinson euqation and the Kardar Parisi Zhang equation.

An interface at Equilibrium: the Edward Wilkinson equation

Consider domain wall $h(r,t)$ fluctuating at equilibrium at the temparature $T$. Here $t$ is time, $r$ defines the d-dimensional coordinate of the interface and $h$ is the scalar height field. Hence, the domain wall separating two phases in a film has $d=1,r\in {ℛ}$, in a solid instead $d=2,r\in {{ℛ}}^{{𝟐}}$.

Two assumptions are done:

• Overhangs, pinch-off are neglected, so that $h(r,t)$ is a scalar univalued function.
• The dynamics is overdamped, so that we can neglect the inertial term.

Derivation

The Langevin equation of motion is

${\partial }_{t}h(r,t)=-\mu \frac{\delta E_{pot}}{\delta h(r,t)}+\eta (r,t)$

The first term $-\delta E_{pot}/\delta h(r,t)$ is the elastic force trying to smooth the interface, the mobility $\mu$ is inversily proportional to the viscosity. The second term is the Langevin Gaussian noise defined by the correlations

$⟨\eta (r,t)⟩=0,⟨\eta (r^{\prime },t^{\prime })\eta (r,t)⟩=2D{\delta }^d(r-r^{\prime })\delta (t-t^{\prime })$

The symbol $⟨\dots ⟩$ indicates the average over the thermal noise. The diffusion constant is fixed by the Eistein relation (fluctuation-dissipation theorem):

$D=\mu K_{B}T$

The potential energy of surface tension can be expanded at the lowest order in the gradient:

$E_{pot}=\sigma \int d^{d}r\sqrt{1+(\mathrm{\nabla }h{)}^2}\sim \text{const.}+\frac{\sigma }{2}\int d^{d}r(\mathrm{\nabla }h{)}^2$

Setting $\mu =1,\sigma =1/2$ we have the Edward Wilkinson equation:

${\partial }_{t}h(r,t)={\mathrm{\nabla }}^{2}h(r,t)+\eta (r,t)$