Directed Cascades Generate New Critical Universality Classes

Abstract

Spectrally stable cascades can undergo enormous transient growth before eventually dying out. We show that this amplification is controlled by the directed architecture of the interactions, independently of the eigenvalues that determine asymptotic stability. More remarkably, when several critical subsystems are connected sequentially, their depth becomes a new control parameter for critical fluctuations: each additional critical stage generates a new cascade-size exponent, producing an infinite hierarchy of universality classes. This result follows because the fluctuating population produced at one stage becomes the random input to the next. The mechanism persists for both finite-variance and heavy-tailed reproduction and strongly enhances the probability of rare terminal events. Applied to multitype earthquake triggering, it provides a stationary mechanism for the anomalously large abundance of foreshock-mainshock sequences. Directed architecture can therefore control both transient amplification and critical statistics in cascade processes even when it leaves spectral stability unchanged.