Identification of macroscopic variables for low-order modeling of thin-film growth

We identify a minimum set of "coarse" (i.e., macroscopic) spatially invariant parameters that accurately describe the dominant behavior of the deposition surface during thin-film growth under adsorption and surface diffusion. We demonstrate, through kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulations, that different deposition surfaces constructed through a stochastic reconstruction procedure, with identical values for these parameters, exhibit approximately identical coarse dynamic behavior. These parameters can be subsequently employed to develop low-order state-space models for controller synthesis and optimization as an alternative to computationally expensive kMC simulations.