Effect of spatial bias on the nonequilibrium phase transition in a system of coagulating and fragmenting particles

Abstract

We examine the effect of spatial bias on a nonequilibrium system in which masses on a lattice evolve through the elementary moves of diffusion, coagulation and fragmentation. When there is no preferred directionality in the motion of the masses, the model is known to exhibit a nonequilibrium phase transition between two different types of steady states, in all dimensions. We show analytically that introducing a preferred direction in the motion of the masses inhibits the occurrence of the phase transition in one dimension, in the thermodynamic limit. A finite size system, however, continues to show a signature of the original transition, and we characterize the finite size scaling implications of this. Our analysis is supported by numerical simulations. In two dimensions, bias is shown to be irrelevant.