Circular Kardar-Parisi-Zhang interfaces evolving out of the plane

Circular KPZ interfaces spreading radially in the plane have GUE Tracy-Widom (TW) height distribution (HD) and Airy$_2$ spatial covariance, but what are their statistics if they evolve on the surface of a different background space, such as a bowl, a cup, or any surface of revolution? To give an answer to this, we report here extensive numerical analyses of several one-dimensional KPZ models on substrates whose size enlarges as $langle L(t) rangle = L_0+omega t^{gamma}$, while their mean height $langle h rangle$ increases as usual [$langle h ranglesim t$]. We show that the competition between the $L$ enlargement and the correlation length ($xi simeq c t^{1/z}$) plays a key role in the asymptotic statistics of the interfaces. While systems with $gamma>1/z$ have HDs given by GUE and the interface width increasing as $w sim t^{beta}$, for $gamma<1/z$ the HDs are Gaussian, in a correlated regime where $w sim t^{alpha gamma}$. For the special case $gamma=1/z$, a continuous class of distributions exists, which interpolate between Gaussian (for small $omega/c$) and GUE (for $omega/c gg 1$). Interestingly, the HD seems to agree with the Gaussian symplectic ensemble (GSE) TW distribution for $omega/c approx 10$. Despite the GUE HDs for $gamma>1/z$, the spatial covariances present a strong dependence on the parameters $omega$ and $gamma$, agreeing with Airy$_2$ only for $omega gg 1$, for a given $gamma$, or when $gamma=1$, for a fixed $omega$. These results considerably generalize our knowledge on the 1D KPZ systems, unveiling the importance of the background space in their statistics.