Ballistic deposition with memory: a new universality class of surface growth with a new scaling law

Abstract

Motivated by recent experimental studies in microbiology, we suggest a modification of the classic ballistic deposition model of surface growth, where the memory of a deposition at a site induces more depositions at that site or its neighbors. By studying the statistics of surfaces in this model, we obtain three independent critical exponents: the growth exponent $\beta =5/4$, the roughening exponent $\alpha = 2$, and the new (size) exponent $\gamma = 1/2$. The model requires a modification to the Family-Vicsek scaling, resulting in the dynamical exponent $z = \frac{\alpha+\gamma}{\beta} = 2$. This modified scaling collapses the surface width vs time curves for various lattice sizes. This is a previously unobserved universality class of surface growth that could describe surface properties of a wide range of natural systems.