Materials roughening transition

As remarked above, surface science has come to be partitioned between chemists, physicists and materials scientists. Physicists have played a substantial role, and an excellent early overview of surface science from a physicist s perspective is by Tabor (1981). An example of a surface parepisteme that has been entirely driven by physicists is the study of the roughening transition. Above a critical temperature but... 

Unfortunately, even for low molecular weight material it is difficult to obtain clear experimental evidence for a roughening transition [71]. This is mainly due to the fact that during growth the interface generally assumes a metastable shape and relaxation times are long and increase with crystal size. Therefore we certainly cannot expect a definitive answer for macromolecules. We shall therefore just make several comments which hopefully will be of use when reading the literature. 

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