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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

2016

Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Contact Process With Temporal Disorder, Hatem Barghathi, Thomas Vojta, José A. Hoyos Aug 2016

Contact Process With Temporal Disorder, Hatem Barghathi, Thomas Vojta, José A. Hoyos

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We investigate the influence of time-varying environmental noise, i.e., temporal disorder, on the nonequilibrium phase transition of the contact process. Combining a real-time renormalization group, scaling theory, and large scale Monte-Carlo simulations in one and two dimensions, we show that the temporal disorder gives rise to an exotic critical point. At criticality, the effective noise amplitude diverges with increasing time scale, and the probability distribution of the density becomes infinitely broad, even on a logarithmic scale. Moreover, the average density and survival probability decay only logarithmically with time. This infinite-noise critical behavior can be understood as the temporal counterpart of …


Random Field Disorder At An Absorbing State Transition In One And Two Dimensions, Hatem Barghathi, Thomas Vojta Feb 2016

Random Field Disorder At An Absorbing State Transition In One And Two Dimensions, Hatem Barghathi, Thomas Vojta

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We investigate the behavior of nonequilibrium phase transitions under the influence of disorder that locally breaks the symmetry between two symmetrical macroscopic absorbing states. In equilibrium systems such "random-field" disorder destroys the phase transition in low dimensions by preventing spontaneous symmetry breaking. In contrast, we show here that random-field disorder fails to destroy the nonequilibrium phase transition of the one- and two-dimensional generalized contact process. Instead, it modifies the dynamics in the symmetry-broken phase. Specifically, the dynamics in the one-dimensional case is described by a Sinai walk of the domain walls between two different absorbing states. In the two-dimensional case, …