Critical behavior of a Ginzburg-Landau model with additive quenched noise

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a mean-field Ginzburg-Landau model with quenched noise, predicting a phase transition and exploring the effects of metastability and non-equilibrium dynamics through analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It provides a self-consistent theory for the phase diagram of the model and investigates the impact of metastability and initial conditions on the stationary states.

Findings

Critical noise level induces order-disorder transition.

Susceptibility diverges quadratically near the transition, violating fluctuation-dissipation.

Stationary states depend on initial conditions in metastable regions.

Abstract

We address a mean-field zero-temperature Ginzburg-Landau, or \phi^4, model subjected to quenched additive noise, which has been used recently as a framework for analyzing collective effects induced by diversity. We first make use of a self-consistent theory to calculate the phase diagram of the system, predicting the onset of an order-disorder critical transition at a critical value {\sigma}c of the quenched noise intensity \sigma, with critical exponents that follow Landau theory of thermal phase transitions. We subsequently perform a numerical integration of the system's dynamical variables in order to compare the analytical results (valid in the thermodynamic limit and associated to the ground state of the global Lyapunov potential) with the stationary state of the (finite size) system. In the region of the parameter space where metastability is absent (and therefore the stationary state coincide with the ground state of the Lyapunov potential), a finite-size scaling analysis of the order parameter fluctuations suggests that the magnetic susceptibility diverges quadratically in the vicinity of the transition, what constitutes a violation of the fluctuation-dissipation relation. We derive an effective Hamiltonian and accordingly argue that its functional form does not allow to straightforwardly relate the order parameter fluctuations to the linear response of the system, at odds with equilibrium theory. In the region of the parameter space where the system is susceptible to have a large number of metastable states (and therefore the stationary state does not necessarily correspond to the ground state of the global Lyapunov potential), we numerically find a phase diagram that strongly depends on the initial conditions of the dynamical variables.