Origins of scaling relations in nonequilibrium growth

Carlos Escudero, Elka Korutcheva

Published 2010-04-15, updated 2012-03-14Version 4

Scaling and hyperscaling laws provide exact relations among critical exponents describing the behavior of a system at criticality. For nonequilibrium growth models with a conserved drift there exist few of them. One such relation is $\alpha +z=4$, found to be inexact in a renormalization group calculation for several classical models in this field. Herein we focus on the two-dimensional case and show that it is possible to construct conserved surface growth equations for which the relation $\alpha +z=4$ is exact in the renormalization group sense. We explain the presence of this scaling law in terms of the existence of geometric principles dominating the dynamics.