English

Emerging critical behavior at a first-order phase transition rounded by disorder

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2017-06-19 v2 Statistical Mechanics

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.04508,
  title  = {Emerging critical behavior at a first-order phase transition rounded by disorder},
  author = {Ahmed K. Ibrahim and Thomas Vojta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.04508},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

6 pages, 5 eps figures included, builds on arXiv:1504.00408, final version as published

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:50:01.170Z