Universal and non-universal steady states in driven aggregation with evaporation

Irreversible aggregation is an archetypal example of a system that can be driven far from equilibrium by sources and sinks of a conserved quantity - in this case, mass. The source is a steady input of monomers and the evaporation of large particles with a small probability is the sink. In this talk I will introduce a mean-field Smoluchowski model of the statistical dynamics of irreversible aggregation and study its steady states. Using exact and heuristic analyses that draw on conceptual analogies with energy cascades in fluid turbulence, we find a universal regime and two distinct non-universal regimes distinguished by the relative importance of mergers between small and large particles. At the boundary between the regimes we find an analogue of the logarithmic correction conjectured by Kraichnan for two-dimensional turbulence.