Jamming states in random sequential adsorption of diffusion-limited aggregates

Abstract

Motivated by the ubiquity of ramified fractal deposits in nature and engineered systems, we investigate the irreversible adsorption of diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) clusters on a square lattice. We study the role of cluster shape diversity on jamming properties of the system by systematically controlling the number of distinct shapes used across and within realizations, encompassing both monodisperse and polydisperse model variants. Our large-scale simulations over a broad range of cluster sizes $2⩽k⩽4096$ show that the jamming density decreases with cluster size as a power-law $p_j(k)-p_j^{\infty }\sim k^{-\alpha }$. Both $\alpha$ and $p_j^{\infty }$ are found to depend on the degree of shape diversity, with $\alpha$ ranging from $0.374(2)$ to $0.417(1)$. It is observed that increasing shape polydispersity promotes denser packing. Importantly, the fluctuations of the jamming density exhibit distinct scaling behavior: $\sigma (L)\sim 1/L$ for a fixed pool of cluster shape(s), but remain $L$-independent when the pool of shape(s) is refreshed across different realizations. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that the differences between the model variants systematically diminish with increasing $k$ and are expected to vanish as $k\to \infty$ due to the statistical self-similarity of the DLA clusters.