title: Quenched disorder forbids discontinuous transitions in nonequilibrium low-dimensional systems.
abstract: Quenched disorder affects significantly the behavior of phase transitions. The Imry-Ma-Aizenman-Wehr-Berker argument prohibits first-order or discontinuous transitions and their concomitant phase coexistence in low-dimensional equilibrium systems in the presence of random fields. Instead, discontinuous transitions become rounded or even continuous once disorder is introduced. Here we show that phase coexistence and first-order phase transitions are also precluded in nonequilibrium low-dimensional systems with quenched disorder: discontinuous transitions in two-dimensional systems with absorbing states become continuous in the presence of quenched disorder. We also study the universal features of this disorder-induced criticality and find them to be compatible with the universality class of the directed percolation with quenched disorder. Thus, we conclude that first-order transitions do not exist in low-dimensional disordered systems, not even in genuinely nonequilibrium systems with absorbing states.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Electromagnetismo y Física de la Materia, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: Paula
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Villa Martín
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1003, USA.
authors.forename: Juan A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Bonachela
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Electromagnetismo y Física de la Materia and Instituto Carlos I de Física Teórica y Computacional, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Muñoz
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004735:Energy Transfer; D015233:Models, Statistical; D044367:Phase Transition; D013816:Thermodynamics