NONEQUILIBRIUM PHASE-TRANSITIONS IN LATTICE SYSTEMS WITH RANDOM-FIELD COMPETING KINETICS

We study a class of lattice interacting-spin systems evolving stochastically under the simultaneous operation of several spin-flip mechanisms, each, acting independently and responding to a different applied magnetic field. This induces an extra randomness which may occur in real systems, e.g., a magnetic system under the action of a field varying with a much shorter period than the mean time between successive transitions. Such a situation-in which one may say in some sense that frustration has a dynamical origin- may also be viewed as a nonequilibrium version of the random-field Ising model. By following a method of investigating stationary probability distributions in systems with competing kinetics [P. L. Garrido and J. Marro, Phys. Rev. Lett. 62, 1929 (1989)], we solve one-dimensional lattices supporting different field distributions and transition rates for the elementary kinetical processes, thus revealing a rich variety of phase transitions and critical phenomena. Some exact results for lattices of arbitrary dimension, and comparisons with the standard quenched and annealed random-field models, and with a nonequilibrium diluted antiferromagnetic system, are also reported.