We study coarsening in aggregation-fragmentation models which form condensates in the steady state. Extreme value statistics is used to monitor local condensates which form as the coarsening length scale grows in time, in both the zero range process (ZRP) and conserved mass aggregation model (CMAM). The local condensate mass distribution exhibits scaling, which implies anomalously large fluctuations, with mean and standard deviation both proportional to the coarsening length. Remarkably, the state of the system during coarsening is governed not by the steady state, but rather a pre-asymptotic state in which the condensate mass fluctuates strongly.
(This work was done together with Chandrashekar Iyer and Arghya Das)