Devil's Staircase Continuum in the Chiral Clock Spin Glass with Competing Ferromagnetic-Antiferromagnetic and Left-Right Chiral Interactions

TL;DR

This paper explores a complex 3D chiral clock spin-glass model with competing interactions, revealing a rich phase diagram featuring devil's staircase structures, multiple phases, and reentrant behaviors through renormalization-group analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed renormalization-group study of a 5-state chiral clock spin-glass model, uncovering intricate devil's staircase phenomena and diverse phase behaviors in three dimensions.

Findings

Identification of multiple chiral and ferromagnetic phases.

Discovery of devil's staircase structures at phase boundaries.

Observation of reentrant disordered phases and complex phase diagram dynamics.

Abstract

The chiral clock spin-glass model with q=5 states, with both competing ferromagnetic-antiferromagnetic and left-right chiral frustrations, is studied in d=3 spatial dimensions by renormalization-group theory. The global phase diagram is calculated in temperature, antiferromagnetic bond concentration p, random chirality strength, and right-chirality concentration c. The system has a ferromagnetic phase, a multitude of different chiral phases, a chiral spin-glass phase, and a critical (algebraically) ordered phase. The ferromagnetic and chiral phases accumulate at the disordered phase boundary and form a spectrum of devil's staircases, where different ordered phases characteristically intercede at all scales of phase-diagram space. Shallow and deep reentrances of the disordered phase, bordered by fragments of regular and temperature-inverted devil's staircases, are seen. The extremely rich phase diagrams are presented as continuously and qualitatively changing videos.