A Monte Carlo investigation of the critical behavior of Stavskaya's probabilistic cellular automaton

Abstract

Stavskaya's model is a one-dimensional probabilistic cellular automaton (PCA) introduced in the end of the 1960's as an example of a model displaying a nonequilibrium phase transition. Although its absorbing state phase transition is well understood nowadays, the model never received a full numerical treatment to investigate its critical behavior. In this short article we characterize the critical behavior of Stavskaya's PCA by means of Monte Carlo simulations and finite-size scaling analysis. The critical exponents of the model are calculated and indicate that its phase transition belongs to the directed percolation universality class of critical behavior, as it would be expected on the basis of the directed percolation conjecture. We also explicitly establish the relationship of the model with the Domany-Kinzel PCA on its directed site percolation line, a connection that seems to have gone unnoticed in the literature so far.