Critical behavior of the two-dimensional randomly driven lattice gas

We investigate the critical behavior of the two-dimensional randomly driven lattice gas, in which particles are driven along one of the lattice axes by an infinite external field with randomly changing sign. A finite-size scaling (FSS) analysis provides novel evidences that this model is not in the same universality class as the driven lattice gas with a constant drive (DLG), contrarily to what has been recently reported in the literature. Indeed, the FSS functions of transverse observables (i.e., related to order-parameter fluctuations with wave vector perpendicular to the direction of the field) differ from the mean-field behavior-both predicted and observed in the DLG. In sharp contrast to the case of the DLG, FSS can be established only for rectangular lattices where the dimension in the direction of the field grows as the second power of the other dimension. Further, the transverse Binder cumulant does not vanish at the critical point. © 2005 The American Physical Society.