Study of damage spreading in dimer-dimer irreversible surface reaction models

The spreading of globally distributed damage was studied in two variants of an irreversible dimer-dimer surface reaction model of the type . The first model (model M1) neglects desorption of B2. On the contrary, the second version (model M3) takes this process into account. Both models exhibit irreversible (kinetic) phase transitions (IPT) from a reactive state with sustained production of B2A molecules to surface poisoned states without B2A production. Model M1 has a zero-width reaction window with a single critical point at which damage spreading is observed. For model M3 the damage also spreads and exhibits an abrupt discontinuity at the critical point where a continuous IPT from the poisoned state to the reactive regime is observed. Damage healing was only observed when M3 can be mapped onto a simple adsorption-desorption process of B2. Close to the chaotic-frozen transition the order parameter critical exponent was found to be β 1.075 ± 0.019.