Nonuniversal aging during phase separation with long-range interaction

Issues concerning the kinetics of phase transitions are not well established for the cases where the order parameter remains conserved with time, particularly when the interatomic interactions are long-range in nature. Here we present results on structure, growth, and aging from Monte Carlo simulations of the two-dimensional long-range Ising model. In our computer simulations, random initial configurations, for 50:50 compositions of up and down spins, mimicking high-temperature equilibrium states, have been quenched to temperatures inside the coexistence curve. Our analyses of the simulation data, for such a protocol, show interesting dependence of the aging exponent, λ, on σ, the parameter, within the Hamiltonian, that controls the range of interaction. These nonuniversal values of λ are compared with a theoretical result for lower bounds. For this purpose, we extracted information on relevant aspects of structural properties during the evolution. To estimate λ, as is necessary, we also calculated the average domain size and analyzed its time dependence to obtain the growth exponent α which also is nonuniversal. The trends in the values of λ and α, as well as an anomaly in structure, suggest that a crossover from the long-range to the short-range variety occurs at σ≃1. The location of this boundary and the nonuniversality provide a picture that is surprisingly different from that of the corresponding static critical phenomena. Furthermore, our results suggest an important scaling law combining α and λ.