Quantifying Nonequilibrium Behavior with Varying Cooling Rates

Abstract

We investigate nonequilibrium behavior in (1+1)-dimensional stochastic field theories in the context of Ginzburg-Landau models at varying cooling rates. We argue that a reliable measure of the departure from thermal equilibrium can be obtained from the absolute value of the rate of change of the momentum-integrated structure function, $ΔS_{\rm{tot}}$. We show that the peak of $ΔS_{\rm{tot}}$ scales with the cooling, or quench, time-scale, $τ_q$, in agreement with the prediction by Laguna and Zurek for the scaling of freeze-out time in both over and under-damped regimes. Furthermore, we show that the amplitude of the peak scales as $τ_q^{-6/5}$ independent of the viscosity.