Surface morphology coarsening in a nonlocal system

Direct comparison is made of the steady-sates and coarsening dynamics in a local system and its nonlocal generalization. The example system is the surface of a solid film in a strong electric field; the morphological evolution of the surface is described, in the long-wavelength approximation, by the amplitude PDE for the film height function. It is shown that the amplitude of the steady-state and the coarsening rate of the surface structure are very sensitive to the radius of the long-range interaction, and that both quantities increase as the radius decreases.