Kinetic roughening with anisotropic growth rules - art. no. 046108

Inspired by the chemical etching processes, where experiments show that gro wth rates depending on the local environment might play a fundamental role in determining the properties of the etched surfaces, we study here a model for kinetic roughening that includes explicitly an anisotropic effect in t he growth rules. Our model introduces a dependence of the growth rules on t he local environment conditions, i.e., on the local curvature of the surfac e. Variables with different local curvatures of the surface, in fact, prese nt different quenched disorder and a parameter p (which could represent dif ferent experimental conditions) is introduced to account for different time scales for the different classes of variables. We show that the introducti on of this time scale separation in the model leads to a crossover effect o n the roughness properties. This effect could explain the scattering in the experimental measurements available in the literature. The interplay betwe en anisotropy and the crossover effect and the dependence of critical prope rties on parameter p is investigated as well as the relationship with the k nown universality classes.