Dynamics of the two-dimensional directed Ising model: zero-temperature coarsening

We investigate the laws of coarsening of a two-dimensional system of Ising spins evolving under single-spin-flip irreversible dynamics at low temperature from a disordered initial condition. The irreversibility of the dynamics comes from the directedness, or asymmetry, of the influence of the neighbours on the flipping spin. We show that the main characteristics of phase ordering at low temperature, such as self-similarity of the patterns formed by the growing domains, and the related scaling laws obeyed by the observables of interest, which hold for reversible dynamics, are still present when the dynamics is directed and irreversible, but with different scaling behaviour. In particular the growth of domains, instead of being diffusive as is the case when dynamics is reversible, becomes ballistic. Likewise, the autocorrelation function and the persistence probability (the probability that a given spin keeps its sign up to time t) have still power-law decays but with different exponents.