Category: Physics

Summary: Testing whether adding a moderate temporally refreshed component to columnar KPZ disorder increases roughness while reducing axial locking.

KPZ growth with columnar disorder can lock interfaces to preferred directions, while fully annealed noise produces a different roughening regime. This experiment asks what happens in between, when columnar forcing is mixed with a temporally refreshed component instead of being purely frozen or purely annealed.

The simulation sweeps the mixing fraction and measures both saturated roughness and anisotropy in two-dimensional growth. The central hypothesis is that moderate mixing can soften the directional locking caused by frozen columns while still preserving enough structured disorder to enhance roughness beyond either limiting case.

That makes the project a crossover study between disorder classes. Rather than treating quenched and annealed forcing separately, it asks whether their mixture creates a distinct regime with its own roughness and anisotropy signature.

Method: GPU-accelerated 2D KPZ simulations with mixed columnar and temporally refreshed disorder, sweeping the mix fraction and measuring roughness and anisotropy.

What is measured: Saturated roughness, axial locking or anisotropy, dependence on columnar-temporal mixing fraction, and comparison with purely columnar and fully annealed limits.