Damage spreading in a driven lattice gas model

We studied damage spreading in a Driven Lattice Gas (DLG) model as a function of the temperature T, the magnitude of the external driving field E, and the lattice size. The DLG model undergoes an order-disorder second-order phase transition at the critical temperature T-c(E), such that the ordered phase is characterized by high-density strips running along the direction of the applied field; while in the disordered phase one has a lattice-gas-like behavior. It is found that the damage always spreads for all the investigated temperatures and reaches a saturation value D-sat that depends only on T. D-sat increases for T < T-c(E = infinity), decreases for T > T-c(E = infinity) and is free of finite-size effects. This behavior can be explained as due to the existence of interfaces between the high-density strips and the lattice-gas-like phase whose roughness depends on T. Also, we investigated damage spreading for a range of finite fields as a function of T, finding a behavior similar to that of the case with E = infinity. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.