Understanding surface limiting processes occurring during the relaxation of steps on vicinal surfaces

In our recently constructed Fokker-Planck formalism for describing the equilibration of the terrace-width distribution of a vicinal surface from an arbitrary initial configuration, the meaning of the relaxation time, related to the strength of the random noise in the underlying Langevin equation, was rather unclear. Using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations we show that the time constant exhibits activated behavior with a barrier that has a physically plausible dependence on the energies of the governing atomistic model. Thus, the Fokker-Planck time has some physical meaning.