  Recently some of us have constructed a Fokker-Planck formalism to describe
the equilibration of the terrace-width distribution of a vicinal surface from
an arbitrary initial configuration. However, the meaning of the associated
relaxation time, related to the strength of the random noise in the underlying
Langevin equation, was rather unclear. Here we present a set of careful kinetic
Monte Carlo simulations that demonstrate convincingly that the time constant
shows activated behavior with a barrier that has a physically plausible
dependence on the energies of the governing microscopic model. Furthermore, the
Fokker-Planck time at least semiquantitatively tracks the actual physical time.
