Dynamic transition in deposition with a poisoning species

In deposition with a poisoning species, we show that the transition to a blocked or pinned phase may be viewed as an absorbing transition in the directed percolation (DP) class. We consider a ballisticlike deposition model with an active and an inactive species that represents the basic features of the process and exhibits a transition from a growing phase to a blocked phase, with the deposition rate as the order parameter. In the growing phase, the interface width shows a crossover from the critical W∼t behavior to Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) scaling, which involves DP and KPZ exponents in the saturation regime. In the pinned phase, the maximum heights and widths scale as H_s∼W_s∼(p-p_c)^-ν_‖. The robustness of the DP class suggests investigations in real systems.