Dynamic percolation transition induced by phase separation: A Monte Carlo analysis

Abstract

The percolation transition of geometric clusters in the three-dimensional, simple cubic, nearest neighbor Ising lattice gas model is investigated in the temperature and concentration region inside the coexistence curve. We consider “quenching experiments,” where the system starts from an initially completely random configuration (corresponding to equilibrium at infinite temperature), letting the system evolve at the considered temperature according to the Kawasaki “spinexchange” dynamics. Analyzing the distributionnl(t) of clusters of sizel at timet, we find that after a time of the order of about 100 Monte Carlo steps per site a percolation transition occurs at a concentration distinctly lower than the percolation concentration of the initial random state. This dynamic percolation transition is analyzed with finite-size scaling methods. While at zero temperature, where the system settles down at a frozen-in cluster distribution and further phase separation stops, the critical exponents associated with this percolation transition are consistent with the universality class of random percolation, the critical behavior of the transient time-dependent percolation occurring at nonzero temperature possibly belongs to a different, new universality class.