Fast Domain Growth

External forces can dramatically accelerate coarsening. Both animations on this page have a conserved number of particles (white spots), with an external force pushing the particles up. In this model, the mobility of the particles is high if they have few neighbors present. Thus, they move quickly through the dark empty regions and produce a net motion of the open spaces. In the animation at top, only ten percent of the spaces are empty. Here, we see large vacancy regions moving much more swiftly than small ones and sweeping through large areas to produce runaway growth.
In the bottom animation, thirty percent of the spaces are empty. Here, the speed of a region varies less with its size and all of the vacancy regions grow at once. Late pictures look somewhat like early pictures blown up to a larger size, reminiscient of growth without an external force.

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The Paper

• Fast Coarsening in a Driven Diffusive Lattice Gas: The Paper.
• Text of paper (dvi format),
• Figure 1a, Figure 1b, Figure 1c, Figure 1d, Figure 2, Figure 3a, Figure 3b, Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 6a, Figure 6b, Figure 6c, Figure 6d, Figure 7, Figure 8, Figure 9, Figure 10, Figure 11, Figure 12, Figure 13,
• General References

We think this is closely related to an electromigration experiment of Brian Moeckly and Bob Buhrman.

Other Related Subjects

• What is Coarsening?
• Logarithmic Coarsening
• Numerical Enzymes
• Void Experiments

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This research was paid for by THE US GOVERNMENT through the National Science Foundation (NSF #DMR-9419506) and through the Cornell Theory Center.

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Last modified: May 26, 1995