Interface fluctuations under shear - art. no. 012102

Coarsening systems under uniform shear display a long time regime character ized by the presence of highly stretched and thin domains. The question the n arises whether thermal fluctuations may actually destroy this layered str ucture. To address this problem in the case of nonconserved dynamics, we st udy an anisotropic version of the Burgers equation, constructed to describe thermal fluctuations of an interface in the presence of a uniform shear fl ow. As a result, we find that stretched domains are only marginally stable against thermal fluctuations in d=2, whereas they are stable in d=3.