NONEQUILIBRIUM CRITICAL RELAXATION WITH COUPLING TO A CONSERVED DENSITY

We study non-equilibrium critical relaxation properties of model C (purely dissipative relaxation of an order parameter coupled to a conserved density) starting from a macroscopically prepared initial state with short-range correlations. Using a field-theoretic renormalization group approach we show that all the stages of growth of the correlation length display universal behaviour governed by a new critical exponent theta. This exponent is calculated to second order in epsilon = 4 - d where d is the spatial dimension of the system.