Phase ordering kinetics in Light-Heavy-Vacancy model: unusual coarsening dynamics

RESUMO

We study a one dimensional lattice model of coupled driven system where two kinds of hardcore particle species, `light' and `heavy', move on a fluctuating landscape. Light particles prefer to move upward along the local height gradient of the landscape, and heavy particles prefer to move downhill. In addition, these particle species also exert bias on the local height profile. The unoccupied or vacant parts of the landscape experience no bias and undergo symmetric height fluctuations. In an earlier work, we had derived a phase diagram of the system consisting of different kinds of ordered and disordered phases. In the ordered phase, one or both particle species phase-separate, while the landscape forms a large hill or deep valley. Here we study coarsening by monitoring the development of long-range order in the particles and landscape from an initially disordered state. Unlike conventional phase-ordering systems, where coarsening proceeds through the formation and merger of ordered domains, here we find that domains formed at early times become unsustainable at later times. Instead of merging together, these early domains disintegrate and new domains emerge which finally give rise to large scale ordered structure in the long time limit, resulting a highly unusual coarsening behavior. For particle coarsening, the characteristic length scale grows with two distinctly different power law exponents at early and late times. The landscape coarsening is even more dramatic where the length scale decreases for brief time-intervals, instead of increasing continuously. The height fluctuations of the landscape shows periodic oscillations with time during the coarsening phase. Using linear hydrodynamics we explain that this is caused by three normal modes which move through the system like travelling waves. We calculate the propagation velocities of these modes within mean field approximation.