Apparent hysteresis in a driven system with self-organized drag

Apparent hysteresis in a driven system with self-organized drag was investigated within a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation. An effective potential that quantitatively describes the stable and metastable states of the system and the kinetics of the transitions between them was constructed. It was found that increasing either the impurity diffusivity or the heat of segregation leads to more effective pinning and thus increasingly jerky domain wall dynamics. It was suggested that the approach can be used to quantify the emergence of hysteresis in a wide variety of physical systems.