Breakdown of Universality in Transitions to Spatiotemporal Chaos
Tomas Bohr, Martin van Hecke, René Mikkelsen, Mads Ipsen · Physical Review Letters · 2001
We show that the transition from laminar to active behavior in extended chaotic systems can vary from a continuous transition in the universality class of directed percolation with infinitely many absorbing states to what appears as a first-order transition. The latter occurs when finite lifetime nonchaotic structures, called "solitons," dominate the dynamics. We illustrate this scenario in an extension of the deterministic Chaté-Manneville coupled map lattice model and in a soliton including variant of the stochastic Domany-Kinzel cellular automaton.