Corrections to reaction-diffusion dynamics above the upper critical dimension.

Abstract

Reaction-diffusion models are common in many areas of statistical physics, where they describe the late-time dynamics of chemical reactions. Using a Bose gas representation, which maps the real-time dynamics of the reactants to the imaginary-time evolution of an interacting Bose gas, we consider corrections to the late-time scaling of k-particle annihilation processes kA→∅ above the upper critical dimension, where mean-field theory sets the leading order. We establish that the leading corrections are not given by a small renormalization of the reaction rate due to k-particle memory effects, but instead set by higher-order correlation functions that capture memory effects of subclusters of reactants. Drawing on methods developed for ultracold quantum gases and nuclear physics, we compute these corrections exactly for various annihilation processes with k>2.