Interplay between coarsening and nucleation in an Ising model with dipolar interactions

Abstract

We study the dynamical behavior of a square lattice Ising model with exchange and dipolar interactions by means of Monte Carlo simulations. After a sudden quench to low temperatures we find that the system may undergo a coarsening process where stripe phases with different orientations compete or alternatively it can relax initially to a metastable nematic phase and then decay to the equilibrium stripe phase through nucleation. We measure the distribution of equilibration times for both processes and compute their relative probability of occurrence as a function of temperature and system size. This peculiar relaxation mechanism is due to the strong metastability of the nematic phase, which goes deep in the low temperature stripe phase. We also measure quasi-equilibrium autocorrelations in a wide range of temperatures. They show a distinct decay to a plateau that we identify as due to a finite fraction of frozen spins in the nematic phase. We find indications that the plateau is a finite size effect. Relaxation times as a function of temperature in the metastable region show super-Arrhenius behavior, suggesting a possible glassy behavior of the system at low temperatures.

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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Stripe-tetragonal phase transition in the 2D Ising model with dipole interactions: Partition-function zeros approach
• Phase transitions and autocorrelation times in two-dimensional Ising model with dipole interactions
• Dynamics of topological defects in a two-dimensional magnetic domain stripe pattern
• Dynamics of domain growth driven by dipolar interactions in a perpendicularly magnetized ultrathin film
• Dynamical signature of a domain phase transition in a perpendicularly-magnetized ultrathin film
• Finite temperature phase diagram of ultrathin magnetic films without external fields
• Non-equilibrium structures and slow dynamics in a two dimensional spin system with competitive long range and short range interactions
• Mean-field phase diagram and spin glass phase of the dipolar Kagome Ising antiferromagnet
• Glassy behavior of two-dimensional stripe-forming systems
• Non-Arrhenius relaxation of the Heisenberg model with dipolar and anisotropic interactions
• Dipolar Ising Model: Phases, Growth Laws and Universality