Richards Howard L, Einstein T L
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742-4111, USA.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2005 Jul;72(1 Pt 2):016124. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.72.016124. Epub 2005 Jul 20.
The so-called generalized Wigner distribution has earlier been shown to be an excellent approximation for the terrace width distribution (TWD) of vicinal surfaces characterized by step-step interactions that are perpendicular to the average step direction and fall off as the inverse square of the step spacing. In this paper, we show that the generalized Wigner distribution can be derived from a plausible, phenomenological model in which two steps interact with each other directly and with other steps through a position-dependent pressure. We also discuss generalizations to more general step-step interactions and show that the predictions are in good agreement with TWDs derived from numerical transfer-matrix calculations and Monte Carlo simulations. This phenomenological approach allows the step-step interaction to be extracted from experimental TWDs.
所谓的广义维格纳分布早前已被证明是对近邻表面台阶宽度分布（TWD）的一种出色近似，这些近邻表面的特征是台阶间相互作用垂直于平均台阶方向，且随台阶间距的平方反比衰减。在本文中，我们表明广义维格纳分布可从一个合理的唯象模型推导得出，在该模型中，两个台阶直接相互作用，并通过与位置相关的压力与其他台阶相互作用。我们还讨论了对更一般的台阶间相互作用的推广，并表明预测结果与从数值转移矩阵计算和蒙特卡罗模拟得出的TWDs吻合良好。这种唯象方法能够从实验得到的TWDs中提取出台阶间相互作用。
