Universal aspects of vacancy-mediated disordering dynamics: the effect of external fields

We investigate the disordering of an initially phase-segregated binary alloy, due to a highly mobile defect which couples to an electric or gravitational field. Using both mean-field and Monte Carlo methods, we show that the late stages of this process exhibit dynamic scaling, characterized by a set of exponents and scaling functions. A new scaling variable emerges, associated with the field. While the scaling functions carry information about the field and the boundary conditions, the exponents are universal. They can be computed analytically, in excellent agreement with simulation results.