New universal short-time scaling behaviour of critical relaxation processes

Abstract

We study the critical relaxation properties of Model A (purely dissipative relaxation) starting from a macroscopically prepared initial state characterised by non-equilibrium values for order parameter and correlations. Using a renormalisation group approach we observe that even (macroscopically)early stages of the relaxation process display universal behaviour governed by a new, independent “initial slip” exponent. For large times, the system crosses over to the well-known long-time relaxation behaviour. The new exponent is calculated toO(e2) in e=4−d, whered is the spatial dimension of the system. The initial slip scaling form of general correlation and response functions as well as the order parameter is derived, exploiting a short-time operator expansion. The leading scaling behaviour is determined by initial states with sharp values of the order parameter. Non-vanishing correlations generate corrections to scaling.