Slow coarsening in a class of driven systems

The coarsening process in a class of driven systems is studied. These syste ms have previously been shown to exhibit phase separation and slow coarseni ng in one dimension. We consider generalizations of this class of models to higher dimensions. In particular we study a system of three types of parti cles that diffuse under local conserving dynamics in two dimensions. Argume nts and numerical studies are presented indicating that the coarsening proc ess in any number of dimensions is logarithmically slow in time. A key feat ure of this behavior is that the interfaces separating: the various growing domains are macroscopically smooth (well approximated by a Fermi function) . This implies that the coarsening mechanism in one dimension is readily ex tendible to higher dimensions.