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arXiv:1602.04508 · Fortschritte der Physik

Emerging critical behavior at a first‐order phase transition rounded by disorder

Ahmed K. Ibrahim, Thomas Vojta

Published Dec 28, 2016• 3 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the two‐dimensional four‐color Ashkin‐Teller model by means of large‐scale Monte‐Carlo simulations. We demonstrate that the first‐order phase transition of the clean system is destroyed by random disorder introduced via site dilution. The critical behavior of the emerging continuous transition belongs to the clean two‐dimensional Ising universality class, apart from logarithmic corrections. These results confirm perturbative renormalization‐group predictions; they also agree with recent findings for the three‐color case, indicating that the critical behavior is universal.

DOI
10.1002/prop.201600018

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We study the effects of quenched disorder on the first-order phase transition in the two-dimensional three-color Ashkin-Teller model by means of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. We demonstrate that the first-order phase transition is rounded by the disorder and turns into a continuous one. Using a careful finite-size-scaling analysis, we provide strong evidence for the emerging critical behavior of the disordered Ashkin-Teller model to be in the clean two-dimensional Ising universality class, accompanied by universal logarithmic corrections. This agrees with perturbative renormalization-group predictions by Cardy. As a byproduct, we also provide support for the strong-universality scenario for the critical behavior of the two-dimensional disordered Ising model. We discuss consequences of our results for the classification of disordered phase transitions as well as generalizations to other systems.
We investigate the zero-temperature quantum phase transitions of the disordered three-color quantum Ashkin-Teller spin chain by means of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the first-order phase transitions of the clean system are rounded by the quenched disorder. For weak intercolor coupling, the resulting emergent quantum critical point between the paramagnetic phase and the magnetically ordered Baxter phase is of infinite-randomness type and belongs to the universality class of the random transverse-field Ising model, as predicted by recent strong-disorder renormalization group calculations. We also find evidence for unconventional critical behavior in the case of strong intercolor coupling, even though an unequivocal determination of the universality class is beyond our numerical capabilities. We compare our results to earlier simulations, and we discuss implications for the classification of phase transitions in the presence of disorder.
We study the critical behavior of the 2D N-color Ashkin-Teller model in the presence of random bond disorder whose correlations decays with the distance r as a power-law r -a .We consider the case when the spins of different colors sitting at the same site are coupled by the same bond and map this problem onto the 2D system of N/2 flavors of interacting Dirac fermions in the presence of correlated disorder.Using renormalization group we show that for N = 2, a "weakly universal" scaling behavior at the continuous transition becomes universal with new critical exponents.For N > 2, the first-order phase transition is rounded by the correlated disorder and turns into a continuous one.
An intriguing result of statistical mechanics is that a first-order phase transition can be rounded by disorder coupled to energylike variables. In fact, even more intriguing is that the rounding may manifest itself as a critical point, quantum or classical. In general, it is not known, however, what universality classes, if any, such criticalities belong to. In order to shed light on this question we examine in detail the disordered three-color Ashkin-Teller model by Monte Carlo methods. Extensive analyses indicate that the critical exponents define a new universality class. We show that the rounding of the first-order transition of the pure model due to the impurities is manifested as criticality. However, the magnetization critical exponent, β, and the correlation length critical exponent, ν, are found to vary with disorder and the four-spin coupling strength, and we conclusively rule out that the model belongs to the universality class of the two-dimensional Ising model.
We study the nonequilibrium phase transition in the two-dimensional contact process on a randomly diluted lattice by means of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations for times up to 10;{10} and system sizes up to 8000x8000 sites. Our data provide strong evidence for the transition being controlled by an exotic infinite-randomness critical point with activated (exponential) dynamical scaling. We calculate the critical exponents of the transition and find them to be universal, i.e., independent of disorder strength. The Griffiths region between the clean and the dirty critical points exhibits power-law dynamical scaling with continuously varying exponents. We discuss the generality of our findings and relate them to a broader theory of rare region effects at phase transitions with quenched disorder. Our results are of importance beyond absorbing state transitions because, according to a strong-disorder renormalization group analysis, our transition belongs to the universality class of the two-dimensional random transverse-field Ising model.
We consider the two-dimensional randomly site diluted Ising model and the random-bond +/-J Ising model (also called the Edwards-Anderson model), and study their critical behavior at the paramagnetic-ferromagnetic transition. The critical behavior of thermodynamic quantities can be derived from a set of renormalization-group equations, in which disorder is a marginally irrelevant perturbation at the two-dimensional Ising fixed point. We discuss their solutions, focusing in particular on the universality of the logarithmic corrections arising from the presence of disorder. Then, we present a finite-size scaling analysis of high-statistics Monte Carlo simulations. The numerical results confirm the renormalization-group predictions, and in particular the universality of the logarithmic corrections to the Ising behavior due to quenched dilution.