Effect of random environment on kinetic roughening: Kardar-Parisi-Zhang model with a static noise coupled to the Navier-Stokes equation

Abstract

Kinetic roughening of a randomly growing surface can be modelled by the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation with a time-independent (``spatially quenched'' or ``columnar'') random noise. In this paper, we use the field-theoretic renormalization group approach to investigate how randomly moving medium affects the kinetic roughening. The medium is described by the stochastic differential Navier-Stokes equation for incompressible viscous fluid with an external stirring force. We find that the action functional for the full stochastic problem should be extended to be renormalizable: a new nonlinearity must be introduced. Moreover, in order to correctly couple the scalar and velocity fields, a new dimensionless parameter must be introduced as a factor in the covariant derivative of the scalar field. The resulting action functional involves four coupling constants and a dimensionless ratio of kinematic coefficients. The one-loop calculation (the leading order of the expansion in $\varepsilon=4-d$ with $d$ being the space dimension) shows that the renormalization group equations in the five-dimensional space of those parameters reveal a curve of fixed points that involves an infrared attractive segment for $\varepsilon>0$.