Critical behavior of a driven diffusive system: the influence of a perpendicular drive

It is known that below a certain critical temperature, driven diffusive systems exhibit an ordered phase with striped patterns running along the direction of the drive, while above the critical point a gas-like disordered phase is observed. In this work, the influence of an additional drive, applied in the direction perpendicular to the original one, is studied and discussed. It is found that fixing the temperature and the density of particles, the system also exhibits order–disorder transitions when the additional external drive is finely tuned around some critical values. The corresponding phase diagram, which includes both first- and second-order transitions, is analyzed.