Arrested States formed on Quenching Spin Chains with Competing Interactions and Conserved Dynamics

Abstract

We study the effects of rapidly cooling to T = 0 a spin chain with conserved dynamics and competing interactions. Depending on the degree of competition, the system is found to get arrested in different kinds of metastable states. The most interesting of these has an inhomogeneous mixture of interspersed active and quiescent regions. In this state, the steady-state autocorrelation function decays as a stretched exponential $\sim \exp(-{(t/\tau_{o})}^{{1}\over{3}})$, and there is a two-step relaxation to equilibrium when the temperature is raised slightly.