On the Continuum Time Limit of Reaction-Diffusion Systems

Abstract: The parity conserving branching-annihilating random walk (pc-BARW) model is a reaction-diffusion system on a lattice where particles can branch into $m$ offsprings with even $m$ and hop to neighboring sites. If two or more particles land on the same site, they immediately annihilate pairwise. In this way the number of particles is preserved modulo two. It is well known that the pc-BARW with $m=2$ in 1 spatial dimension has no phase transition (it is always subcritical), if the hopping is described by a continuous time random walk. In contrast, the $m=2$ 1-d pc-BARW has a phase transition when formulated in discrete time, but we show that the continuous time limit is non-trivial: When the time step $\delta t\to 0$, the branching and hopping probabilities at the critical point scale with different powers of $\delta t$. These powers are different for different microscopic realizations. Although this phenomenon is not observed in some other reaction-diffusion systems like, e.g. the contact process, we argue that it should be generic and not restricted to the 1-d pc-BARW model.