Unconventional continuous phase transition in a three dimensional dimer model

Fabien Alet 1, Gregoire Misguich 2, Vincent Pasquier 2, Roderich Moessner 3, Jesper Lykke Jacobsen 2, 4

Physical Review Letters 97 (2006) 030403

Phase transitions occupy a central role in physics, due both to their experimental ubiquity and their fundamental conceptual importance. The explanation of universality at phase transitions was the great success of the theory formulated by Ginzburg and Landau, and extended through the renormalization group by Wilson. However, recent theoretical suggestions have challenged this point of view in certain situations. In this Letter we report the first large-scale simulations of a three-dimensional model proposed to be a candidate for requiring a description beyond the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson framework: we study the phase transition from the dimer crystal to the Coulomb phase in the cubic dimer model. Our numerical results strongly indicate that the transition is continuous and are compatible with a tricritical universality class, at variance with previous proposals.

  • 1. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique – IRSAMC (LPT),
    CNRS : UMR5152 – Université Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III
  • 2. Service de Physique Théorique (SPhT),
    CNRS : URA2306 – CEA : DSM/SPHT
  • 3. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l’ENS (LPTENS),
    CNRS : UMR8549 – Université Paris VI – Pierre et Marie Curie – Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris – ENS Paris
  • 4. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques (LPTMS),
    CNRS : UMR8626 – Université Paris XI – Paris Sud
Retour en haut