A coupled two-species model for the pair contact process with diffusion

Abstract

The contact process with diffusion (PCPD) defined by the binary reactions 2 B -> 3 B, 2 B -> 0 and diffusive particle spreading exhibits an unusual active to absorbing phase transition whose universality class has long been disputed. Multiple studies have indicated that an explicit account of particle pair degrees of freedom may be required to properly capture this system's effective long-time, large-scale behavior. We introduce a two-species representation in which single particles B and pairs A are coupled according to the stochastic reactions B + B -> A, A -> A + B, A -> 0, and A -> B + B. Mean-field analysis reveals that the phase transition is driven by competition and balance between both species. We employ Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that this model captures the pertinent PCPD features. In the inactive phase, A particles rapidly go extinct, leaving the B species to undergo pure pair annihilation kinetics. At criticality, both A and B densities decay with the same exponents as the PCPD order parameters, and display mean-field scaling above the critical dimension 2. In one dimension, the critical exponents for the B species obtained from seed simulations agree well with previously reported exponent values. We demonstrate that the scaling properties of consecutive particle pairs in the PCPD are identical with that of the A species in the coupled model. This two-species picture resolves the conceptual difficulty for seed simulations in the original PCPD and naturally introduces multiple length and time scales, which cause strong corrections to scaling. The extracted moment ratios from our simulations indicate that our model displays the same temporal crossover behavior as the PCPD, which further corroborates its full dynamical equivalence with our coupled model.