Universal crossing probabilities and incipient spanning clusters in directed percolation

Shape-dependent universal crossing probabilities are studied, via Monte Carlo simulations, for bond and site directed percolation on the square lattice in the diagonal direction, at the percolation threshold. In a dynamical interpretation, the crossing probability is the probability that, on a system with size L, an epidemic spreading without immunization remains active at time t. Since the system is strongly anisotropic, the shape dependence in space-time enters through the effective aspect ratio r _eff = ct/L ^z, where c is a non-universal constant and z the anisotropy exponent. A particular attention is paid to the influence of the initial state on the universal behaviour of the crossing probability. Using anisotropic finite-size scaling and generalizing a simple argument given by Aizenman for isotropic percolation, we also obtain the behaviour of the probability to find n incipient spanning clusters on a finite system at time t. The numerical results are in good agreement with the conjecture. Received 10 February 2003 Published online 20 June 2003 RID="a" ID="a"e-mail: turban@lpm.u-nancy.fr RID="b" ID="b"UMR CNRS 7556