Fluctuation-dominated phase ordering driven by stochastically evolving surfaces: depth models and sliding particles

Abstract

We study an unconventional phase ordering phenomenon in coarse-grained depth models of the hill-valley profile of fluctuating surfaces with zero overall tilt, and for hard-core particles sliding on such surfaces under gravity. We find that several such systems approach an ordered state with large scale fluctuations which make them qualitatively different from conventional phase ordered states. We consider surfaces in the Edwards-Wilkinson (EW), Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) and noisy surface-diffusion (NSD) universality classes. For EW and KPZ surfaces, coarse-grained depth models of the surface profile exhibit coarsening to an ordered steady state in which the order parameter has a broad distribution even in the thermodynamic limit, the distribution of particle cluster sizes decays as a power-law (with an exponent θ), and the scaled two-point spatial correlation function has a cusp (with an exponent α=1/2) at small values of the argument. The latter feature indicates a deviation from the Porod law which holds customarily, in coarsening with scalar order parameters. We present several numerical and exact analytical results for the coarsening process and the steady state. For linear surface models with a dynamical exponent z, we show that α=(z-1)/2 for z<3 and α=1 for z>3, and there are logarithmic corrections for z=3, implying α=1/2 for the EW surface and 1 for the NSD surface. Within the independent interval approximation we show that a+θ=2. We also study the dynamics of hard-core particles sliding locally downward on these fluctuating one-dimensional surfaces, and find that the surface fluctuations lead to large-scale clustering of the particles. We find a surface-fluctuation driven coarsening of initially randomly arranged particles; the coarsening length scale grows as ~t^1/z. The scaled density-density correlation function of the sliding particles shows a cusp with exponents α~0.5 and 0.25 for the EW and KPZ surfaces. The particles on the NSD surface show conventional coarsening (Porod) behavior with α~1.