Broadening of a nonequilibrium phase transition by extended structural defects

2004/02/29 by Thomas Vojta · 2 citations
Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.stat-mech

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.70.026108

published as Phys. Rev. E 70, 026108 (2004) · 4 pages, 4 eps figures, final version as published

openalex publication_date 2004/08/19 · arxiv created 2004/09/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We study the effects of quenched extended impurities on nonequilibrium phase transitions in the directed percolation universality class. We show that these impurities have a dramatic effect: they completely destroy the sharp phase transition by smearing. This is caused by rare strongly coupled spatial regions which can undergo the phase transition independently from the bulk system. We use extremal statistics to determine the stationary state as well as the dynamics in the tail of the smeared transition, and we illustrate the results by computer simulations.

Citations

• Nonequilibrium Critical Phenomena and Phase Transitions into Absorbing States
• Strong Disorder Fixed Point in Absorbing-State Phase Transitions
• Effect of random defects on the critical behaviour of Ising models
• Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena

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