Evidence for directed percolation universality at the onset of spatiotemporal intermittency in coupled circle maps.

We consider a lattice of coupled circle maps, a popular model for the study of mode-locked phenomena. We find that the onset of spatiotemporal intermittency (STI) in this system is analogous to directed percolation (DP), with the transition being to a unique absorbing state for low nonlinearities, and to weakly chaotic absorbing states for high nonlinearities. We find that the complete set of static exponents and spreading exponents at all critical points match those of DP very convincingly. Further, hyperscaling relations are fulfilled, leading to independent controls and consistency checks of the values of all the critical exponents. These results provide an example in support of the conjecture that the onset of STI in deterministic models belongs to the DP universality class. Nonuniversal spreading exponents are seen only for the cases where the initial state is homogeneous with symmetrically placed seeds leading to strictly symmetric spreading. However, very small departures from homogeneity are sufficient to restore the DP exponents.