Slow dynamics in a driven two-lane particle system

TL;DR

This paper investigates a two-lane particle system with biased diffusion, revealing slow cluster formation and coarsening, with dynamics that resemble certain Ising models rather than glassy systems.

Contribution

It introduces a two-species driven particle model demonstrating slow coarsening and phase transition behaviors, highlighting differences from glassy dynamics and similarities to Ising-type models.

Findings

Clusters form and block each other at high bias q.

Cluster size grows logarithmically over time.

System exhibits power-law cooling-rate effects.

Abstract

We study a two-lane model of two-species of particles that perform biased diffusion. Extensive numerical simulations show that when bias q is strong enough oppositely drifting particles form some clusters that block each other. Coarsening of such clusters is very slow and their size increases logarithmically in time. For smaller q particles collapse essentially on a single cluster whose size seems to diverge at a certain value of q=q_c. Simulations show that despite slow coarsening, the model has rather large power-law cooling-rate effects. It makes its dynamics different from glassy systems, but similar to some three-dimensional Ising-type models (gonihedric models).