Interrupted coarsening in a driven kinetically constrained Ising chain

Abstract

We introduce a driven version of the 1D kinetically constrained spin chain. In its original undriven version, this model shows anomalous coarsening following a quench to a low temperature, with an equilibration time that diverges as exp(1/T^2) for T\to 0. We show that driving of constant rate gamma_dot interrupts coarsening and stabilises the chain in a state analogous to that of a coarsening chain of age 1/gamma_dot. We present an analytical theory for this steady state, and demonstrate it to be in excellent agreement with our simulation results.