2017/11/13 by Andrea Pelissetto, Antonio Tripodo, Ettore Vicari
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #hep-lat
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.97.012123
published as Phys. Rev. E 97, 012123 (2018) · 12 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1502.07599, arXiv:1706.04365
arxiv created 2017/11/13 · arxiv updated 2018/01/24
We investigate the critical properties of the three-dimensional (3D) antiferromagnetic RP(N-1) model, which is characterized by a global O(N) symmetry and a discrete Z2 gauge symmetry. We perform a field-theoretical analysis using the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson (LGW) approach and a numerical Monte Carlo study. The LGW field-theoretical results are obtained by high-order perturbative analyses of the renormalization-group (RG) flow of the most general Phi4 theory with the same global symmetry as the model, assuming a gauge-invariant order-parameter field. For N=4 no stable fixed point is found, implying that any transition must necessarily be of first order. This is contradicted by the numerical results that provide strong evidence for a continuous transition. This suggests that gauge modes are not always irrelevant, as assumed by the LGW approach, but they may play an important role to determine the actual critical dynamics at the phase transition of O(N) symmetric models with a discrete Z2 gauge symmetry.