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Microscopic Modeling of the Growth of Order in an Alloy: Nucleated and Continuous Ordering

We study the early-stages of ordering in $Cu_3 Au$ using a model Hamiltonian derived from the effective medium theory of cohesion in metals: an approach providing a microscopic description of interatomic interactions in alloys. Our simulations show a crossover from a nucleated growth regime to a region where the ordering does not follow any simple growth laws. This mirrors the experimental observations in $Cu_3 Au$. The kinetics of growth, obtained from the simulations, is in semi-quantitative agreement with experiments. The real-space structures observed in our simulations offer some insight into the nature of early-stage kinetics