Nonequilibrium critical dynamics at surfaces: cluster dissolution and nonalgebraic correlations

We study nonequilibrium dynamical properties at a free surface after the system is quenched from the high-temperature phase into the critical point. We show that if the spatial surface correlations decay sufficiently rapidly the surface magnetization and/or the surface manifold autocorrelations have a qualitatively different universal short time behavior than the same quantities in the bulk. At a free surface cluster dissolution may take place instead of domain growth, yielding stationary dynamical correlations that decay in a stretched exponential form. This phenomenon takes place in the three-dimensional Ising model and should be observable in real ferromagnets.