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

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.