Critical behaviour of driven bilayer systems: a field-theoretic renormalization group study

Abstract

We investigate the static and dynamic critical behaviour of a uniformly driven bilayer Ising lattice gas at half filling. Depending on the strength of the interlayer coupling J, phase separation occurs across or within the two layers. The former transitions are controlled by the universality class of model A (corresponding to an Ising model with Glauber dynamics), with upper critical dimension d_c = 4. The latter transitions are dominated by the universality class of the standard (single-layer) driven Ising lattice gas, with d_c = 5 and a non-classical anisotropy exponent. These two distinct critical lines meet at a non-equilibrium bicritical point which also falls into the driven Ising class. At all transitions, novel couplings and dangerous irrelevant operators determine corrections to scaling.