Fundamental ingredients for the emergence of discontinuous phase transitions in the majority vote model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the key factors, such as inertia and network connectivity, that lead to abrupt, discontinuous phase transitions in the majority vote model with up-down symmetry, across different network topologies.

Contribution

It identifies the fundamental ingredients—namely inertia and connectivity—that induce discontinuous transitions in the majority vote model on various topologies.

Findings

Inertia and connectivity are crucial for discontinuous transitions.

Discontinuous transitions occur even in low-dimensional regular lattices.

Scaling behavior differs between regular lattices and complex networks.

Abstract

Discontinuous transitions have received considerable interest due to the uncovering that many phenomena such as catastrophic changes, epidemic outbreaks and synchronization present a behavior signed by abrupt (macroscopic) changes (instead of smooth ones) as a tuning parameter is changed. However, in different cases there are still scarce microscopic models reproducing such above trademarks. With these ideas in mind, we investigate the fundamental ingredients underpinning the discontinuous transition in one of the simplest systems with up-down $Z_2$ symmetry recently ascertained in [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 95}, 042304 (2017)]. Such system, in the presence of an extra ingredient-the inertia- has its continuous transition being switched to a discontinuous one in complex networks. We scrutinize the role of three fundamental ingredients: inertia, system degree, and the lattice topology. Our analysis has been carried out for regular lattices and random regular networks with different node degrees (interacting neighborhood) through mean-field treatment and numerical simulations. Our findings reveal that not only the inertia but also the connectivity constitute essential elements for shifting the phase transition. Astoundingly, they also manifest in low-dimensional regular topologies, exposing a scaling behavior entirely different than those from the complex networks case. Therefore, our findings put on firmer bases the essential issues for the manifestation of discontinuous transitions in such relevant class of systems with $Z_2$ symmetry.