Fluctuation-dissipation relations in critical coarsening: crossover from unmagnetized to magnetized initial states

Abstract

We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of the spherical ferromagnet quenched to its critical temperature, as a function of the magnetization of the initial state. The two limits of unmagnetized and fully magnetized initial conditions can be understood as corresponding to times that are respectively much shorter and much longer than a magnetization timescale, as in a recent field theoretical analysis of the $n$-vector model. We calculate exactly the crossover functions interpolating between these two limits, for the magnetization correlator and response and the resulting fluctuation-dissipation ratio (FDR). For $d>4$ our results match those obtained recently from a Gaussian field theory. For $d<4$, non-Gaussian fuctuations arising from the spherical constraint need to be accounted for. We extend our framework from the fully magnetized case to achieve this, providing an exact solution for the relevant integral kernel. The resulting crossover behaviour is very rich, with the asymptotic FDR $X^\infty$ depending non-monotonically on the scaled age of the system. This is traced back to non-monotonicities of the two-time correlator, themselves the consequence of large magnetization fluctuations on the crossover timescale. We correct a trivial error in our earlier calculation for fully magnetized initial states; the corrected FDR is {\em consistent} with renormalization group expansions to first order in $4-d$ for the longitudinal fluctuations of the O(n) model in the limit $n\to\infty$.