On possible experimental realizations of directed percolation

Haye Hinrichsen

Published 1999-10-19, updated 1999-10-29Version 2

Directed percolation is one of the most prominent universality classes of nonequilibrium phase transitions and can be found in a large variety of models. Despite its theoretical success, no experiment is known which clearly reproduces the critical exponents of directed percolation. The present work compares suggested experiments and discusses possible reasons why the observation of the critical exponents of directed percolation is obscured or even impossible.