From noise on the sites to noise on the links: Discretizing the conserved Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation in real space

Phys Rev E. 2024 Jun;109(6-1):064136. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.109.064136.

Abstract

Numerical analysis of conserved field dynamics has been generally performed with pseudospectral methods. Finite differences integration, the common procedure for nonconserved field dynamics, indeed struggles to implement a conservative noise in the discrete spatial domain. In this work we present a method to generate a conservative noise in the finite differences framework, which works for any discrete topology and boundary conditions. We apply it to numerically solve the conserved Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (cKPZ) equation, widely used to describe surface roughening when the number of particles is conserved. Our numerical simulations recover the correct scaling exponents α, β, and z in d=1 and in d=2. To illustrate the potentiality of the method, we further consider the cKPZ equation on different kinds of nonstandard lattices and on the random Euclidean graph. This is a unique numerical study of conserved field dynamics on an irregular topology, paving the way for a broad spectrum of possible applications.