Absorbing state transitions with long-range annihilation

Abstract

We introduce a family of classical stochastic processes describing diffusive particles undergoing branching and long-range annihilation in the presence of a parity constraint. The probability for a pair-annihilation event decays as a power-law in the distance between particles, with a tunable exponent. Such long-range processes arise naturally in various classical settings, such as chemical reactions involving reagents with long-range electromagnetic interactions. They also increasingly play a role in the study of quantum dynamics, in which certain quantum protocols can be mapped to classical stochastic processes with long-range interactions: for example, state preparation or error correction processes aim to prepare ordered ground states, which requires removing point-like excitations in pairs via non-local feedback operations conditioned on a global set of measurement outcomes. We analytically and numerically describe features of absorbing phases and phase transitions in this family of classical models as pairwise annihilation is performed at larger and larger distances. Notably, we find that the two canonical absorbing-state universality classes -- directed-percolation and parity-conserving -- are endpoints of a line of universality classes with continuously interpolating critical exponents.