5 research outputs found
Universality of cauliflower-like fronts: from nanoscale thin films to macroscopic plants
Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a widely used technique to
grow solid materials with accurate control of layer thickness and composition.
Under mass-transport-limited conditions, the surface of thin films thus produced
grows in an unstable fashion, developing a typical motif that resembles the
familiar surface of a cauliflower plant. Through experiments on CVD production
of amorphous hydrogenated carbon films leading to cauliflower-like fronts,
we provide a quantitative assessment of a continuum description of CVD
interface growth. As a result, we identify non-locality, non-conservation and
randomness as the main general mechanisms controlling the formation of these
ubiquitous shapes.We also show that the surfaces of actual cauliflower plants and
combustion fronts obey the same scaling laws, proving the validity of the theory over seven orders of magnitude in length scales. Thus, a theoretical justification
is provided, which had remained elusive so far, for the remarkable similarity
between the textures of surfaces found for systems that differ widely in physical
nature and typical scales.Publicad