NONEQUILIBRIUM CRITICAL-BEHAVIOR FROM THE MASTER EQUATION

Kinetic models for nonequilibrium phase transitions have been extensiv ely studied via mean-field theory, series expansions, and Monte Carlo simulation. In this paper we present a different approach based on stu dying the normal-mode solutions of the master equation for the system to extract information on the static and dynamic behavior of the syste m in the vicinity of the phase transition. This method provides insigh t into the physics of the transition and offers an alternative techniq ue for analyzing kinetic phase transitions. We demonstrate the method by extracting the critical behavior of a simple model from finite-size scaling.