English

Explosive Percolation is Continuous, but with Unusual Finite Size Behavior

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2013-05-29 v2

Abstract

We study four Achlioptas type processes with "explosive" percolation transitions. All transitions are clearly continuous, but their finite size scaling functions are not entire holomorphic. The distributions of the order parameter, the relative size smax/Ns_{\rm max}/N of the largest cluster, are double-humped. But -- in contrast to first order phase transitions -- the distance between the two peaks decreases with system size NN as NηN^{-\eta} with η>0\eta > 0. We find different positive values of β\beta (defined via <smax/N>(ppc)β< s_{\rm max}/N > \sim (p-p_c)^\beta for infinite systems) for each model, showing that they are all in different universality classes. In contrast, the exponent Θ\Theta (defined such that observables are homogeneous functions of (ppc)NΘ(p-p_c)N^\Theta) is close to -- or even equal to -- 1/2 for all models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1103.3728,
  title  = {Explosive Percolation is Continuous, but with Unusual Finite Size Behavior},
  author = {Peter Grassberger and Claire Christensen and Golnoosh Bizhani and Seung-Woo Son and Maya Paczuski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.3728},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

4 pages (including 4 figures), plus 7 pages of supplementary material

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:41:35.126Z