New universal short-time scaling behaviour of critical relaxation processes

We study the critical relaxation properties of Model A (purely dissipative relaxation) starting from a macroscopically prepared initial state characterised by non-equilibrium values for order parameter and correlations. Using a renormalisation group approach we observe that even (macroscopically)early stages of the relaxation process display universal behaviour governed by a new, independent initial slip exponent. For large times, the system crosses over to the well-known long-time relaxation behaviour.The new exponent is calculated toO(²) in =4–d, whered is the spatial dimension of the system. The initial slip scaling form of general correlation and response functions as well as the order parameter is derived, exploiting a short-time operator expansion. The leading scaling behaviour is determined by initial states with sharp values of the order parameter. Non-vanishing correlations generate corrections to scaling.