Chinese Journal of Physics
Phase Diagram and Tricritical Behavior in the Three Dimensional Heisenberg Model with a Random Field
A. Oubelkacem, K. Htoutou, A. Ainane, M. Saber
Abstract
The random field Ising model (RFIM) has been investigated extensively both theoretically and experimentally in recent years [1–4]. Some questions, such as the lower critical dimension and the existence of a static phase transition, have already been solved from the theoretical point of view, but other questions, such as the existence of the tricritical point, are still open. However, it is now understood that the RFIM describes the essential physics of a rich class of experimentally accessible disordered systems. These include structural phase transitions in random alloys, commensurate charge-density-wave systems with impurity pinning, binary fluid mixtures in random porous media, and the melting of intercalates in layered compounds such as TiS2. The behavior of the RFIM is governed by the competing tendencies of the spins to align ferromagnetically under impetus of the exchange or to follow the local fields and thus be uncorrelated. The RFIM has been studied using different methods. One of the authors [5] of the present paper has developed a new version of effective field theory, which extends the approximation methods [6, 7] to random Ising systems, in which randomness can be described by discrete random variables and the geometry of the lattice can be easily taken into account. This method is based on the determination of the probability distribution of the discrete variables, which takes into account exactly the self-site correlations. This approach has been used to study cooperative phenomena and phase transitions in various systems, and gives useful qualitative and quantitative insights for the critical behavior of a wide variety of classical and quantum lattice spin systems [8–10]. In recent decades, the renormalization group theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena represents one of the most powerful tools of theoretical physics. Therefore, employing this theory (which can be applied for weak fields), the proof