Dynamic Behavior of anisotropic nonequilibrium driving lattice gases

It is shown that intrinsically anisotropic nonequilibrium systems relaxing by a dynamic process exhibit universal critical behavior during their evolution toward nonequilibrium stationary states. An anisotropic scaling ansatz 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.