Discontinuous phase transition in an annealed multi-state majority-vote model

作者:Li, Guofeng; Chen, Hanshuang*; Huang, Feng; Shen, Chuansheng
来源:Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment , 2016, 2016(7): 073403.
DOI:10.1088/1742-5468/2016/07/073403

摘要

In this paper, we generalize the original majority-vote (MV) model with noise from two states to arbitrary q states, where q is an integer no less than two. The main emphasis is paid to the comparison on the nature of phase transitions between the two-state MV (MV2) model and the three-state MV (MV3) model. By extensive Monte Carlo simulation and mean-field analysis, we find that the MV3 model undergoes a discontinuous order-disorder phase transition, in contrast to a continuous phase transition in the MV2 model. A central feature of such a discontinuous transition is a strong hysteresis behavior as noise intensity goes forward and backward. Within the hysteresis region, the disordered phase and ordered phase are coexisting.