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Universality issues in surface kinetic roughening of thin solid films
Since publication of the main contributions on the theory of kinetic
roughening more than fifteen years ago, many works have been reported on
surface growth or erosion that employ the framework of dynamic scaling. This
interest was mainly due to the predicted existence of just a few universality
classes to describe the statistical properties of the morphology of growing
surfaces and interfaces that appear in a wide range of physical systems.
Nowadays, this prediction seems to be inaccurate. This situation has caused a
clear detriment of these studies in spite of the undeniable existence of
kinetic roughening in many different real systems, and without a clear
understanding of the reasons behind the mismatch between theoretical
expectations and experimental observations. In this chapter we aim to explore
existing problems and shortcomings of both the theoretical and experimental
approaches, focusing mainly on growth of thin solid films. Our analysis
suggests that the theoretical framework as yet is not complete, while more
systematic and consistent experiments need to be performed. Once these issues
are taken into account, a more consistent and useful theory of kinetic
roughening might develop.Comment: Review article to appear in ``Advances in Condensed Matter and
Statistical Mechanics", ed. E. Korutcheva and R. Cuerno. To be published by
Nova Science Publishers. 22 pages. 4 eps figure
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