Nonequilibrium Phase Transition in Constrained Adsorption

Abstract: We study the adsorption-desorption of fluid molecules on a solid substrate by introducing a schematic model in which the adsorption/desorption transition probabilities are given by irreversible kinetic constraints with a tunable violation of local detailed balance condition. Numerical simulations show that in one spatial dimension the model undergoes a continuous nonequilibrium phase transition whose location depends on the irreversibility strength. We show that the hierarchy of equations obeyed by multi-point correlation functions can be closed to the second order by means of a simple decoupling approximation, and that the approximated solution for the steady state yields a very good description of the overall phase diagram.