Universality-class crossover by a nonorder field introduced to the pair contact process with diffusion

TL;DR

This study investigates the critical behavior of the one-dimensional pair contact process with diffusion (PCPD) by introducing a nonorder field, revealing a crossover to directed percolation (DP) and clarifying the universality class distinctions.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that adding a nonorder field to PCPD causes a crossover to DP, providing evidence that PCPD belongs to a different universality class.

Findings

Introducing a nonorder field causes a crossover from PCPD to DP.

The crossover indicates PCPD's universality class differs from DP.

Numerical evidence supports the distinct universality class of PCPD.

Abstract

The one-dimensional pair contact process with diffusion (PCPD), an interacting particle system with diffusion, pair annihilation, and creation by pairs, has defied a consensus about the universality class that it belongs to. An argument by Hinrichsen [H. Hinrichsen, Physica A {\bf 361}, 457 (2006)] claims that freely diffusing particles in the PCPD should play the same role as frozen particles, when it comes to the critical behavior. Therefore, the PCPD is claimed to have the same critical phenomena as a model with infinitely many absorbing states that belongs to the directed percolation (DP) universality class. To investigate if diffusing particles are really indistinguishable from frozen particles in the sense of the renormalization group, we numerically study a variation of the PCPD by introducing a nonorder field associated with infinitely many absorbing states. We find that a crossover from the PCPD to the DP occurs due to the nonorder field. Since, by studying a similar model, we exclude the possibility that mere introduction of a nonorder field to one model can entail a nontrivial crossover to another model in the same universality class, we attribute the observed crossover to the difference of the universality class of the PCPD from the DP class.