Aging in Domain Growth

TL;DR

This paper reviews aging phenomena in non-disordered systems undergoing domain growth after a temperature quench, focusing on autocorrelation, autoresponse functions, and the complex scaling behaviors of response functions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of aging in domain growth, emphasizing the role of lower critical dimensionality and exploring non-trivial response function behaviors.

Findings

Hierarchy of aging processes depending on quench temperature and dimensionality

Separation of time scales and fast/slow degrees of freedom in domain growth

Analytical insights into response function scaling behavior

Abstract

The Chapter is devoted to reviewing the main features of aging in non disordered systems relaxing via domain growth, after an istantaneous temperature quench. Using the autocorrelation and autoresponse functions to gauge the deviation from equilibrium, an hierarchy of processes is obtained by changing the temperature of the quench and the space dimensionality. The special role of the lower critical dimensionality is highlighted. Basic properties like the separation of the time scales and the splitting of degrees of freedom into fast and slow variables are treated in detail, both in general terms and through analytical calculations in solvable models. Though domain growth is believed to be a well understood paradigma of slow relaxation, emphasis of this review is on the non trivial aspects, not yet fully clarified, like the response function scaling behavior.