Mapping of the roughness exponent for the fuse model for fracture

Phys Rev Lett. 2008 Feb 1;100(4):045501. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.045501. Epub 2008 Jan 28.

Abstract

The roughness exponent for fracture surfaces in the fuse model has been thought to be universal for narrow threshold distributions and has been important in the numerical studies of fracture roughness. We show that the fuse model gives a disorder dependent roughness exponent for narrow disorders when the lattice is influencing the fracture growth. When the influence of the lattice disappears, the local roughness exponent approaches zeta(local)=0.65+/-0.03 for distribution with a tail toward small thresholds, but with large jumps in the profiles giving corrections to scaling on small scales. For very broad disorders the distribution of jumps becomes a Lévy distribution and the Lévy characteristics contribute to the local roughness exponent.