Emerging Critical Behavior at a First-Order Phase Transition Rounded by Disorder
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.
Recommended Citation
A. K. Ibrahim and T. Vojta, "Emerging Critical Behavior at a First-Order Phase Transition Rounded by Disorder," Progress of Physics, vol. 65, no. 6-8, Wiley-VHC Verlag GmbH & Co., Dec 2016.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1002/prop.201600018
Department(s)
Physics
Research Center/Lab(s)
Center for High Performance Computing Research
Keywords and Phrases
Critical Behavior; Disorder; Phase Transition
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1521-3978
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2016 Wiley-VHC Verlag GmbH & Co., All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Dec 2016
Comments
This work was supported in part by the NSF under Grant Nos. DMR‐1205803 and DMR‐1506152.