Nonequilibrium Phase Transition in Constrained Adsorption

TL;DR

This paper investigates a nonequilibrium phase transition in a constrained adsorption model, revealing how irreversibility influences the transition and providing a good approximation for the steady state behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a schematic model with kinetic constraints and analyzes the phase transition, including a decoupling approximation for correlation functions.

Findings

Continuous phase transition depends on irreversibility strength

Decoupling approximation accurately describes the phase diagram

Model captures key features of nonequilibrium adsorption processes

Abstract

We study the adsorption-desorption of fluid molecules on a solid substrate by introducing a schematic model in which the adsorption/desorption transition probabilities are given by irreversible kinetic constraints with a tunable violation of local detailed balance condition. Numerical simulations show that in one spatial dimension the model undergoes a continuous nonequilibrium phase transition whose location depends on the irreversibility strength. We show that the hierarchy of equations obeyed by multi-point correlation functions can be closed to the second order by means of a simple decoupling approximation, and that the approximated solution for the steady state yields a very good description of the overall phase diagram.