The Effects of Isotropic Etching on Roughening and Smoothing of Nanostructure

The main goal of this letter is to show how the same process such as isotropic etching leads to roughening of the nanocomposite materials while for the roughed nanostructure made of homogeneous materials can lead to smoothing. The three dimensional simulations based on the level set method have been carried out in order to study the influence of the isotropic etch process on dynamics of the roughening and smoothing of the substrates indicating the opposite effects of the same process on the surfaces made of different materials. It is known that some roughness and smoothing characteristics obey simple scaling laws. Here, parameters of the scaling law describing temporal dependence of the surface roughness are determined.