Crossover Behavior from Decoupled Criticality

We study the thermodynamic phase transition of a spin Hamiltonian comprising two 3D magnetic sublattices. Each sublattice contains XY spins coupled by the usual bilinear exchange, while spins in different sublattices only interact via biquadratic exchange. This Hamiltonian is an effective model for XY magnets on certain frustrated lattices such as body centered tetragonal. By performing a cluster Monte Carlo simulation, we investigate the crossover from the 3D-XY fixed point (decoupled sublattices) and find a systematic flow toward a first-order transition without a separatrix or a new fixed point. This strongly suggests that the correct asymptotic behavior is a first-order transition.