In this paper, we present a multispin transition mechanism, which is an extension of the Glauber one, to investigate critical dynamics. By exactly solving the master equation, the influence of the multispin transition mechanism on the dynamic critical behavior is studied for the Gaussian model with nearest-neighbor interactions on d-dimensional lattices (d51, 2, and 3!. The time evolution of magnetization is exactly calculated, and the exact results of relaxation time and dynamic critical exponent are obtained. Our models are divided into two kinds: one is the spin-cluster transition and the other is the arbitrary multispin transition. It is found that there are different relaxation times, but the same dynamical critical exponent for different kinds of multispin transitions. The results show that the dynamical critical exponents are independent of spatial dimensions and configurations of transitional spins, and that the dynamical critical exponent is the same as that of the Glauber dynamics, and thus give a strong support to the simple single-spin-transition dynamics. Finally, we give a brief discussion on the results.

A catalytic reaction model, the Ziff-Gulari-Barshad model, is studied on fractal lattices, and the influence of the order of ramification of the lattice on the dynamic behavior of the model is investigated. According to the Monte Carlo simulation results, the order of ramification of the lattice is not crucial to the existence of the continuous transition. This is different from the equilibrium phase transitions in discrete-symmetry spin models such as the Ising model!. Our results indicate that the criterion of the existence of the reactive phase may be complicated.

Using the real-space renormalization-group transformation, we study the phase transitions of the Ashkin-Teller model including the antiferromagnetic interactions on a type of diamond hierarchical lattices, of which the number of bonds per branch of the generator is odd. The isotropic Ashkin-Teller model and the anisotropic one are, respectively, investigated. We find that the phase diagram, for the isotropic Ashkin-Teller model, consists of five phases, two of which are associated with the partially antiferromagnetic ordering of the system, while the phase diagram, for the anisotropic Ashkin-Teller model, contains 11 phases, six of which are related to the partially antiferromagnetic ordering of the system. The correlation length critical exponents and the crossover exponents are also calculated.

The phase transitions of the anisotropic Ashkin-Teller model on a family of diamond-type hierarchical lattices is studied by means of the transfer-matrix method and the real-space renormalization-group transformation. We find that the phase diagram, for the ferromagnetic case, consists of five phases, i.e., the fully disordered paramagnetic phase P, the fully ordered ferromagnetic phase F, and three partially ordered ferromagnetic phases Fs, F s, and Fs s, as well as ten nontrivial fixed points. The correlation length critical exponents and the crossover exponents are also calculated. In addition, we also investigate the variations of the critical exponents with the fractal dimension df, the number of branches m, and the number of bonds per branch b of the generator of the family of diamond-type hierarchical lattices. Finally we give a brief discussion about universality.

The Potts antiferromagnet situated on the fractal family of diamond-type hierarchical lattices is investigated The exact analysis of our findings reveals that the algebraically ordered behavior pre- dicted by Berker and Kadanoff can exist on such lattices with L=odd, where L is the structure pa- rameter of the hierarchical lattices; however, similar behavior to that of the antiferromagnetic Potts model on a decorated square lattice is exhibited for systems with L=even. We find that the different constructions that have the same ffactal dimensionality can have a different cutoff value q 0, in contrast with the translationally invariant system. We also give the ground-state entropy at q=qo in a closed form for the systems with L=even.