PHASE TRANSITIONS IN A PROBABILISTIC CELLULAR AUTOMATON WITH TWO ABSORBING STATESDynamical Modeling In Biotechnology

We study the phase diagram and the critical behavior of a one-dimensional radius-1 two-state totalistic probabilistic cellular automaton having two absorbing states. This system exhibits a first-order phase transition between the fully occupied state and the empty state, two second-order phase transitions between a partially occupied state and either the fully occupied state or the empty state, and a second-order damage-spreading phase transition. It is found that all the second-order phase transitions have the same critical behavior as the directed percolation model. The mean-field approximation gives a rather good qualitative description of all these phase transitions.