# Reply to “Comment on ‘Macroscopic Equation for the Roughness of Growing Interfaces in Quenched Disorder’ ”

Braunstein et al. replies: In a comment of the recent paper , Lopez et al.  obtained analytically the short time behavior of the directed percolation depinning (DPD) model . Their results explains the behavior of the temporal derivative of the interface width (DSIW) for all $`q`$ until a time $`t\text{e}^2`$. We argue that the fail in reproducing the early time regime until the correlations are generated ($`t1`$ at the depinning transition) is because the density of active sites of the interface is not a constant $`p`$. This density depends on time as we will show below. At time $`t`$ a site $`i`$, of a one dimensional lattice of size $`L`$, is chosen at random with probability $`1/L`$. Let us denote by $`h_i(t)`$ the height of the $`i`$-th generic site at time $`t`$. The set of $`\{h_i,i=1,\mathrm{},L\}`$ defines the interface between “wet” and “dry” cells. We shall denote $`F_i=F_i(h_i+1)`$ the activity of the $`i`$-th generic site above the interface. If the cell $`(i,h_i+1)`$ is active $`F_i=1`$ (unblocked) otherwise $`F_i=0`$ (blocked). The time evolution for the probability of active sites $`f(F_i=1,t)f(t)`$ just above of the interface in a time step $`\delta t=1/L`$ is

$$f(t+\delta t)=\frac{p}{L}f(t)+(1\frac{1}{L})f(t).$$
(1)   
This equation takes into account the probability that a cell above the interface remains active after a time step $`\delta t`$. The first term take into account the probability of growth $`f/L`$ in the $`i`$-th column times the probability $`p`$ that the new cell of the interface be active. The second term is the probability that no growth occurs in the $`i`$-th column when the cell is active. Taking the limit $`\delta t0`$ in Eq. (1) and solving the equation, with initial condition $`f(0)=p`$, we obtain

$$f(t)=p\text{e}^{qt}.$$
(2)   
Notice that $`f(t)`$ is the interface activity density (IAD), i.e. $`f(t)=\{F_i\}`$ where the brackets (braces) denotes averages over the lattice (realizations). Notice that $`f(t)`$ is close to $`p`$ until $`t\text{e}^2`$ where the result of López et. al. holds. To obtain a more realistic description for the DSIW until the correlation are generated ($`t1`$) it is necessary to take into account the temporal dependence of the IAD. Let us consider a growth model in a system of size $`L`$ with density $`f(t)`$ of active cells in the early time regime. In this regimen the lateral correlations are negligible. Assuming independence between $`F_i`$ and $`h_i`$, the time evolution for the probability of having a column with height $`h`$ at time $`t`$ is given by

$$P(h,t+\delta t)=P(h1,t)\frac{f(t)}{L}+P(h,t)\left(1\frac{f(t)}{L}\right).$$
(3)   
Taking the limit $`\delta t0`$ we obtain the master equation for the probability. Using the generating function of moments, one can calculate the DSIW:

$$\frac{dw^2}{dt}=f(t).$$
(4)   
For $`t1`$ horizontal correlations are generated and Eq. (2) breaks down. From numerical simulations we could check that the hypothesis assumed to derive Eq (3) holds in the neighborhood of the criticality and in the pinned phase but it breaks down for $`qq_c`$. However, these values of $`q`$ are not interesting from an experimental point of view . A comparison of Eq.(4) with numerical simulations of the DPD model  is presented in Fig. 1 for the critical value. We can see that until $`t\text{e}^2`$ the analytic result of Eq. (4) and the one obtained by López et al. are coincident with the numerical results of the DSIW. This is because in this regime $`f(t)p`$. As time goes on, $`f(t)`$ decays and the hypothesis of López et al. does not hold as we can see in this Figure. However, our analytical result predicts the DSIW until $`t1`$.

Finally, we argue that contrary to what it is claimed in the comment of , Braunstein and Buceta’s formula does describe the macroscopic behavior of the interface even when the solution is not exactly a matching between the early \[Eq. (4)\] and the asymptotic regimes.