arXiv:1001.1052v1 [cond-mat.soft] 7 Jan 2010 Kinetic roughening-like transition with finite nucleation barrier (Dated: November 21, 2018) Recent observations of the growth of protein crystals have identified two different growth regimes. At low supersaturation, the surface of the crystal is smooth and increasing in size due to the nucleation of steps at defects and the subsequent growth of the steps. At high supersaturation, nucleation occurs at many places simultaneously, the crystal surface becomes rough and the growth velocity increases more rapidly with increasing supersaturation than in the smooth regime. Kinetic roughening transitions are typically assumed to be due to the vanishing of the barrier for two- dimension nucleation on the surface of the crystal. We show here, by means of both analytic mean field models and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations that a transition between different growth modes reminiscent of kinetic roughening can also arise as a kinetic effect occurring at finite nucleation barriers. PACS numbers: 82.20.Wt, 81.10.Aj, 82.60.Nh ∗ Electronic address: jlutsko@ulb.ac.be; URL: http://www.lutsko.com 1 Abstract James F. Lutsko, Vasileios Basios, and Gr´egoire Nicolis Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems CP 231, Universit´ e Libre de Bruxelles, Blvd. du Triomphe, 1050 Brussels, Belgium ∗ John J. Kozak Dept. of Chemistry, DePaul University, 243 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60604, USA Mike Sleutel and Dominique Maes Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2 Building E, 1050 Brussel, Belgium