Fractality in persistence decay and domain growth during ferromagnetic ordering: Dependence upon initial correlation

Abstract

The dynamics of ordering in the Ising model, following quench to zero temperature, has been studied via Glauber spin-flip Monte Carlo simulations in space dimensions d = 2 and 3. One of the primary objectives has been to understand phenomena associated with the persistent spins, viz., time decay in the number of unaffected spins, growth of the corresponding pattern, and its fractal dimensionality for varying correlation length in the initial configurations, prepared at different temperatures, at and above the critical value. It is observed that the fractal dimensionality and the exponent describing the power-law decay of persistence probability are strongly dependent upon the relative values of nonequilibrium domain size and the initial equilibrium correlation length. Via appropriate scaling analyses, these quantities have been estimated for quenches from infinite and critical temperatures. The above-mentioned dependence is observed to be less pronounced in the higher dimension. In addition to these findings for the local persistence, we present results for the global persistence as well. Furthermore, important observations on the standard domain growth problem are reported. For the latter, a controversy in d = 3, related to the value of the exponent for the power- law growth of the average domain size with time, has been resolved.