Eur. Phys. J. B 48, 75-80 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2005-00370-5

Annealing two-dimensional diffusion-limited aggregates

¹ Instituto de Investigaciones en Materiales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apdo. Postal 70-360, 04510 México, D.F., Mexico
² Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apdo. Postal 20-364, 01000 México, D.F., Mexico

Corresponding author: ^a memo@fisica.unam.mx

Received: 5 May 2005
Revised: 6 September 2005
Published online: 9 December 2005

Abstract

We have studied the structure of annealed two-dimensional diffusion-limited aggregates (DLA). The annealing process consists of introducing internal flexibility to the original DLA rigid structure as well as excluded volume interactions between particles. From extensive Monte Carlo simulations we obtained aggregates with fractal dimension slightly higher than that obtained for two-dimensional DLA structures. This is somehow surprising since the fractal dimension of the annealed structure is determined not only by connectivity but also by the competing effects of excluded volume interactions and configurational entropy, whilst in the rigid DLA only diffusion counts for the fractal-dimension value.