Roughening transition in a model for dimer adsorption and desorption

Haye Hinrichsen, Geza Odor

Published 1998-10-16Version 1

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 only desorb 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.