Experimental and Computational Study of the Effect of the System Size on Rough Surfaces For.pdfVIP

EXPERIMENTAL AND COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF THE SYSTEM SIZE ON ROUGH SURFACES FORMED BY SEDIMENTING PARTICLES IN QUASI-TWO-DIMENSIONS K. V. McCloud Department of Physics and Engineering, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA 70125 4 0 U. Cardak and M. L. Kurnaz 0 Department of Physics, Bogazici University, 34342 Bebek Istanbul 2 The roughness exponent of surfaces obtained by dispersing silica spheres into a quasi-two- g dimensional cell is examined using experimental and computational methods. The cell consists u of two glass plates separated by a gap, which is comparable in size to the diameter of the beads. A We have studied the effect of changing the gap between the plates to a limit of about twice the 2 diameter of the beads. If the conventional scaling analysis is performed, the roughness exponent is 2 found to be robust against changes in the gap between the plates. The surfaces formed have two roughness exponents in two length scales, which have a crossover length about 1 cm.; however, the ] computational results do not show the same crossover behavior. The single exponent obtained from t the simulations stays between the two roughness exponents obtained in the experiments. f o s PACS numbers: PACS numbers: 05.40.+j, 47.15.Gf, 47.53.+n, 81.15.Lm . t a m I. INTRODUCTION and velocity fluctuations [15,