Pair contact process with diffusion - A new type of nonequilibrium critical behavior?

Abstract

Recently Carlon et. al. investigated the critical behavior of the pair contact process with diffusion [cond-mat/9912347]. Using density matrix renormalization group methods, they estimate the critical exponents, raising the possibility that the transition might belong to the same universality class as branching annihilating random walks with even numbers of offspring. This is surprising since the model does not have an explicit parity-conserving symmetry. In order to understand this contradiction, we estimate the critical exponents by Monte Carlo simulations. The results suggest that the transition might belong to a different universality class that has not been investigated before.