Beyond dynamic scaling: Rare events break universality
Phys. Rev. E 114, 034136 – Published 21 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/49f5-xpvg
Abstract
Surface growth driven by nonmonomeric deposition has remained largely unexplored. We investigate a model based on the deposition of blobs with a power-law size distribution . We find that the critical exponents vary continuously with , recovering Kardar-Parisi-Zhang behavior only for . For , roughness scaling exhibits strong corrections and scale invariance breaks down. We show that this behavior originates from the emergence of a second dynamical length scale , corresponding to the linear size of the largest cluster, in addition to the usual correlation length . The coexistence of these two relevant scales signals the breakdown of the usual Family-Vicsek scaling. These results point to an interesting phenomenology of surface growth beyond the standard scale-invariant paradigm.