Critical behavior of a non-equilibrium interacting particle system driven by an oscillatory field

First- and second-order temperature-driven transitions are studied, in a la ttice gas driven by an oscillatory field. The short-time dynamics study pro vides upper and lower bounds for the first-order transition points obtained using standard simulations. The difference between upper and lower bounds is a measure for the strength of the first-order transition and becomes neg ligibly small for densities close to one half. In addition, we give strong evidence on the existence of multicritical points and a critical temperatur e gap, the latter induced by the anisotropy introduced by the driving field .