The physics of far-from-equilibrium growth phenomena represents one of
the important applications of fractal geometry. Fractals are objects
having a special kind of geometrical complexity and are characterised
by a non-integer (fractal) dimensionality. These objects have a self-s
imilar structure. A part of the object looks like the whole under appr
opriate scaling. Examples of growth processes leading to objects with
fractal structures include dendritic solidification, viscous fingering
, aggregation, electrodeposition, etc. These objects have a self-simil
ar or scale invariant structure in a statistical sense. The volume of
the object bounded by its surface is related to its linear size in a p
owerlaw fashion and the scaling exponent is the fractal dimension. Sev
eral theoretical models have been proposed to explain the observed gro
wth processes. Some important models are diffusion limited aggregation
, ballistic aggregation, cluster-cluster aggregation, etc. The compute
r simulations of these models are able to reproduce the growth process
es and resulting structures reasonably well. Multifractal scaling, whi
ch is a generalisation of simple fractal scaling, is also important in
analysing fractal growth processes. Multifractals allow us to probe d
ifferent scaling relations and physical and geometrical properties dep
endent on scaling relations.