Kinetics of domain growth: the relevance of two-step quenches

Abstract

Domain growth in the wake of a rapid quench from high to low temperatures is studied via Monte Carlo simulations of a ten-state Potts model on a triangular lattice. Quenches in which the temperature is lowered in one step and in two steps are studied. The exponent which characterizes the late-stage growth of domains is found to have different values for one-step and two-step quenches, if standard methods are used to obtain this exponent numerically. However, this difference becomes insignificant if the origin of time for two-step quenches is shifted relative to the origin for one-step quenches to compensate for the larger initial domain sizes in the two-step case. The interpretation of recent experiments on two-step quenches is shown to suffer from a similar ambiguity.