Kinetics of Ising Ferromagnets: Sudden Quench to Zero-Temperature and Slow Cooling

Speaker: Paul Krapivsky, Boston University

When: January 20, 2010 (Wed), 03:15PM to 04:15PM (add to my calendar)

This event is part of the Condensed Matter Theory Seminar Series.

Abstract: I will discuss Ising ferromagnets endowed with a non-conservative spin-flip dynamics. In the first part of the talk I will consider the evolution of Ising ferromagnets after a sudden quench to a temperature below the critical temperature. I will overview various known results and emphasize subtleties that can occur when a ferromagnet is quenched to zero temperature. In this situation, a ground state is surely reached only in one dimension, while more unexpected behaviors occur in higher dimensions. In the second part of the talk I will show that the dynamics of an Ising chain can be probed in the general case of an arbitrary annealing protocol. In the interesting case of an extremely slow cooling to zero temperature, I will show how to compute the density of domain walls at the end of the cooling procedure.