Critical behavior and crossover scaling in the Light-Heavy model

Abstract

The Light-Heavy (LH) model involves two species of particles (light and heavy) coupled with a fluctuating surface (described by tilts). The dynamics include the inherent diffusion of the particles (or tilts) as well as the drive provided by the tilts (or particles). When the two are of similar magnitude, the system lies in the unscaled (uLH) regime, while a significantly weaker drive leads to the scaled (sLH) regime. In the unscaled limit, the model exhibits an order-disorder transition characterized by the fluctuation-dominated phase ordering (FDPO). In this state, interestingly the dynamics is driven by multiple modes, giving rise to dynamic clusters. Away from the critical regime the disordered phase retains vestiges of FDPO behavior on length scales smaller than the correlation length. We examine this local FDPO-like behavior by using a scaling function that links the off-critical and critical regimes. We next turn to the scaled model and show that the multi-mode dynamics present in the unscaled regime is replaced by dynamics that is effectively controlled by a single dominant mode in the scaled regime. Concurrently, the two-point correlations change from the $\mathcal{O}(1)$ FDPO form to an anomalous long-range form that decays as $1/\sqrt{L}$. Drawing on the analogy with the sABC model, where similar anomalous correlations appear at criticality, we derive an analytical expression for the two-point correlation function using the same approach used for that model.