A bilayer Ising model consisting of two Bethe lattices, each of which is coupled with crystal fields of different strengths and each with a branching ratio of q Ising spins with one of the layers having only spin-1 and the other having only spin-3/2, is laid over the top of the other and the two layers are tied together via an interaction between the vertically aligned spins. After obtaining the ground-state (GS) phase diagrams on different possible planes depending on the given system parameters, the changes in the order-parameters and the free energy are investigated by use of the exact recursion relations in a pairwise approach to calculate the phase diagrams of the model. The ferromagnetic ordering in each of the layers and ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic ordering of the adjacent nearest-neighbor (NN) spins of the layers are considered. The system presents both second- and first-order phase transitions. The lines of the first-order phase transitions end on either the stable or unstable tricritical points or at the isolated critical points. The model also displays one or two compensation temperatures when the bilinear interaction of the upper layer with spin-1 can compete with that of the lower layers with spin-3/2.
Disorder is an inevitable part of any condensed matter system and therefore its study has always been of great importance. The effect of quenched randomness on a system that exhibits a continuous phase transition in the absence of any impurity has been studied in the past and the results are relatively well understood. However, the effect of quenched randomness on \\emph{first-order} phase transitions is still not well understood. In this dissertation, we study the effect of quenched bond-randomness on the classical and quantum first-order phase transitions.In Chapter 2, we study the effect of the disordered three-color Ashkin-Teller model, whose pure version undergoes a first-order phase transition. We show that the rounding of the first-order transition of the pure model due to the impurities is manifested as a critical point. We conclusively rule out that the model belongs to the universality class of the two-dimensional Ising model. Furthermore, we find that the exponents
beta and
nu vary with disorder and the four-spin coupling strength.In Chapter 3, we extend our study of the disordered three-color Ashkin-Teller model. Utilizing extensive cluster Monte Carlo simulations on large lattice sizes of up to
128times128 spins, each of which is represented by three colors taking values
pm1, we show that the rounding of the first-order phase transition is an emergent criticality.We find that the critical exponents,
nu and
beta, change as the strength of disorder or the four-spin coupling varies, and we show that the correlation length critical exponent violates the lower bound
2/Dlenu, where
D is the dimension of the system.In Chapter 4, we study the \\emph{quantum} three-color Ashkin--Teller model and show that the quantum critical point in
(1+1) dimension is an unusual one, with activated scaling at the critical point and Griffiths-McCoy phase away from it. We find that the behavior is similar to the transverse random field Ising model, even though the pure system has a first-order transition in this case.
In this work we investigate the quantum phase transitions at zero temperature of the one-dimensional transverse Ising model with an extra term containing four-spin interactions. The competition between the energy couplings of the model leads to an interesting zero-temperature phase diagram. We use a modified Lanczos method to determine the ground state and the first excited state energies of the system, with sizes of up to 20 spins. We apply finite size scaling to the energy gap to obtain the boundary region where ferromagnetic to paramagnetic transition takes place. We also find the critical exponent associated with the correlation length. We find a degenerate
⟨3,1⟩ phase region. The first-order transition boundary between this phase and the paramagnetic phase is determined by analyzing the behavior of the transverse spin susceptibility as the system moves from one region to the other.