Kinetics of phase ordering with topological textures

Abstract

We study the role played by topological textures and antitextures during the phase ordering of a two-dimensional system described by the discretised nonlinear O(3) sigma model with purely dissipative dynamics. We identify and characterise two distinct mechanisms for the decay of the order parameter variations --- single texture unwinding, and topological charge annihilation. Our results show that while at early times after the quench, the annihilation process dominates, the unwinding processes become of comparable importance at later times. We calculate the correlations in the order parameter and in the topological charge density, and show that dynamical scaling is strongly violated due to the occurence of multiple length scales growing differently in time.

Comments: 10 pages in Revtex 3.0, 6 postscript figures in a separate uuencoded file. One extra figure (Fig. 2 in the paper) available by request from zapotock@uiuc.edu, together with a hardcopy of the paper.