Aging-induced continuous phase transitions

Oriol Artime1, Antonio F. Peralta1, Raúl Toral1, José J. Ramasco1 and Maxi San Miguel1

1Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

(July 2018)

Aging is considered as the property of the elements of a system to be less prone to change state as they get older. We incorporate aging into the noisy voter model, a stochastic model in which the agents modify their binary state by means of noise and pair--wise interactions. Interestingly, due to aging the system passes from a finite--size discontinuous transition between ordered (ferromagnetic) and disordered (paramagnetic) phases to a second order phase transition, well--defined in the thermodynamic limit, belonging to the Ising universality class. We characterize it analytically by finding the stationary solution of an infinite set of mean field equations. The theoretical predictions are tested with extensive numerical simulations in low dimensional lattices and complex networks. We finally employ the aging properties to understand the symmetries broken in the phase transition.

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