Relevance of topological disorder on the directed percolation phase transition

Abstract: Despite decades of research, the precise role of topological disorder in critical phenomena has yet to be fully understood. A major contribution has been the work by Barghathi and Vojta, which uses spatial correlations to explain puzzling earlier results. However, due to its reliance on coordination number fluctuations, their criterion cannot be applied to constant-coordination lattices, raising the question, for which classes of transitions this type of disorder can be a relevant perturbation. In order to cast light on this question, we investigate the non-equilibrium phase transition of the two-dimensional contact process on different types of spatial random graphs with varying or constant coordination number. Using large-scale numerical simulations, we find the disorder to be relevant, as the dynamical scaling behaviour turns out to be non-conventional, thus ruling out the directed percolation universality class. We conjecture that the relevance of topological disorder is linked to how strongly connected the lattice is. Based on this assumption, we design two analysis tools that succeed in qualitatively distinguishing relevant from non-relevant topological disorders, supporting our conjecture and possibly pointing the way to a more complete relevance criterion.