Coarsening and percolation in a disordered ferromagnet

Abstract

By studying numerically the phase-ordering kinetics of a two-dimensional ferromagnetic Ising model with quenched disorder -- either random bonds or random fields -- we show that a critical percolation structure forms in an early stage and is then progressively compactified by the ensuing coarsening process. Results are compared with the non-disordered case, where a similar phenomenon is observed, and interpreted within a dynamical scaling framework.

15 pages, 7 figures