Aging-induced continuous phase transition

Aging is considered as the property of the elements of a system to be less prone to change states as they get older. We incorporate aging into the noisy voter model, a stochastic model in which the agents modify their binary state by means of noise and pairwise interactions. Interestingly, due to aging the system passes from a finite-size discontinuous transition between ordered (ferromagnetic) and disordered (paramagnetic) phases to a second order phase transition, well defined in the thermodynamic limit, belonging to the Ising universality class. We characterize it analytically by finding the stationary solution of an infinite set of mean field equations. The theoretical predictions are tested with extensive numerical simulations in low dimensional lattices and complex networks. We finally employ the aging properties to understand the symmetries broken in the phase transition.Partial financial support has been received from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI, Spain) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional under Project ESOTECOS Project No. FIS2015-63628-C2-2-R (AEI/FEDER,UE) and the Spanish State Research Agency, through the María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711). A.F.P. acknowledges support by the Formación de Profesorado Universitario (FPU14/00554) program of Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deportes (MECD) (Spain).Peer reviewe