Surface and bulk properties of deposits grown with a bidisperse ballistic deposition model

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2007 Jun;75(6 Pt 1):061608. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.75.061608. Epub 2007 Jun 28.

Abstract

We study roughness scaling of the outer surface and the internal porous structure of deposits generated with the three-dimensional bidisperse ballistic deposition (BBD), in which particles of two sizes are randomly deposited. Systematic extrapolation of roughness and dynamical exponents and the comparison of roughness distributions indicate that the top surface has Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) scaling for any ratio F of the flux between large and small particles. A scaling theory predicts the characteristic time of the crossover from random to correlated growth in BBD and provides relations between the amplitudes of roughness scaling and F in the KPZ regime. The porosity of the deposits monotonically increases with F and scales as F{12} for small F, which is also explained by the scaling approach and illustrates the possibility of connecting surface growth rules and bulk properties. The suppression of relaxation mechanisms in BBD enhances the connectivity of the deposits when compared to other ballisticlike models, so that they percolate down to F approximately 0.05. The fractal dimension of the internal surface of the percolating deposits is D{F} approximately 2.9, which is very close to the values in other ballistic-like models and suggests universality among these systems.