Dynamic behavior of anisotropic non-equilibrium driving lattice gases

It is shown that intrinsically anisotropic non-equilibrium systems relaxing by a dynamic process exhibit universal critical behavior during their evolution toward non-equilibrium stationary states. An anisotropic scaling anzats for the dynamics is proposed and tested numerically. Relevant critical exponents can be evaluated self-consistently using both the short- and long-time dynamics frameworks. The obtained results allow us to clarify a long-standing controversy about the theoretical description, the universality and the origin of the anisotropy of driven diffusive systems, showing that the standard field theory does not hold and supporting a recently proposed alternative theory.