Growth and roughness of the interface for ballistic deposition

Abstract

In ballistic deposition (BD), $(d+1)$-dimensional particles fall sequentially at random towards an initially flat, large but bounded $d$-dimensional surface, and each particle sticks to the first point of contact. For both lattice and continuum BD, a law of large numbers in the thermodynamic limit establishes convergence of the mean height and surface width of the interface to constants $h(t)$ and $w(t)$, respectively, depending on time $t$. We show that $h(t)$ is asymptotically linear in $t$, while $w(t)$ grows at least logarithmically in $t$ when $d=1$. We also give duality results saying that the height above the origin for deposition onto an initially flat surface is equidistributed with the maximum height for deposition onto a surface growing from a single site.