- Accepted Paper
Beyond dynamic scaling: Rare events break universality
Phys. Rev. E - Accepted 21 August, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/49f5-xpvg
Phys. Rev. E - Accepted 21 August, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/49f5-xpvg
Surface growth driven by non-monomeric 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 a new phenomenology of surface growth beyond the standard scale-invariant paradigm.
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