2004/04/30 by M. Waechter, Matthias Waechter, F. Riess +4
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Surface Roughness and Optical Measurements #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #physics.data-an
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjb/e2004-00317-4
published as The European Physical Journal B 41, pp. 259-277 (2004) · Minor text changes to be identical with the published version
openalex publication_date 2004/09/01 · arxiv created 2004/11/30 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This paper shows in detail the application of a new stochastic approach for the characterization of surface height profiles, which is based on the theory of Markov processes. With this analysis we achieve a characterization of the scale dependent complexity of surface roughness by means of a Fokker-Planck or Langevin equation, providing the complete stochastic information of multiscale joint probabilities. The method is applied to several surfaces with different properties, for the purpose of showing the utility of this method in more details. In particular we show the evidence of Markov properties, and we estimate the parameters of the Fokker-Planck equation by pure, parameter-free data analysis. The resulting Fokker-Planck equations are verified by numerical reconstruction of conditional probability density functions. The results are compared with those from the analysis of multi-affine and extended multi-affine scaling properties which is often used for surface topographies. The different surface structures analysed here show in details advantages and disadvantages of these methods.