Critical and tricritical behavior of a selectively diluted triangular Ising antiferromagnet in a field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how selective dilution affects the phase transitions of a frustrated triangular Ising antiferromagnet in a magnetic field, revealing complex phase diagrams and tricritical points through theory and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a combined effective-field theory and Monte Carlo simulation approach to analyze the impact of selective dilution on phase transition order and tricritical behavior.

Findings

Highly diluted systems show only second-order transitions.

Weakly diluted systems exhibit only first-order transitions.

Intermediate dilution leads to tricritical points where transition order changes.

Abstract

We study a geometrically frustrated triangular Ising antiferromagnet in an external magnetic field which is selectively diluted with nonmagnetic impurities employing an effective-field theory with correlations and Monte Carlo simulations. We focus on the frustration-relieving effects of such a selective dilution on the phase diagram and find that it can lead to rather intricate phase diagrams in the dilution-field parameters space. In particular, in a highly (weakly) diluted system the frustration is greatly (little) relieved and such a system is found to display only the second(first)-order phase transitions at any field. On the other hand, for a wide interval of intermediate dilution values the transition remains second order at low fields but it changes to first order at higher fields and the system displays a tricritical behavior. The existence of the first-order transition in the region of intermediate dilution and high fields is verified by Monte Carlo simulations.