Polytype kinetics and quenching of spin chains with competing interactions using trimer-flip dynamics

Abstract

We consider the effects of a quench to T=0 on a spin system with axial next-next nearest neighbour Ising interactions, evolving under a conserved 3-spin flip dynamics. Such a model is motivated by the kinetics of stacking layers in polytypes near the 3C-6H transition. We find that the system generically gets arrested in interesting metastable states which have inhomogeneously distributed quiescent and active regions. In such arrested states, the autocorrelation function decays as a stretched exponential ~exp(-(t/τ₀) ^1/3). The latter feature can be understood in terms of a mapping of the dynamics within active stretches to the well known simple exclusion process of particles on a line, and bounds can be put on τ_o.