Nonperturbative renormalization group approach to frustrated magnets

TL;DR

This paper applies a nonperturbative renormalization group method to study the critical behavior of frustrated magnets, explaining nonuniversal scaling and weak first order transitions, and resolving previous theoretical discrepancies.

Contribution

It introduces a nonperturbative approach that clarifies the physics of frustrated magnets and explains the absence of universality and the nature of their phase transitions.

Findings

Explains the mismatch between perturbative approaches via fixed point annihilation.

Provides a coherent picture consistent with experimental and numerical data.

Shows the existence of scaling without fixed points, leading to weak first order behavior.

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of the critical properties of classical XY and Heisenberg frustrated magnets in three dimensions. We first analyze the experimental and numerical situations. We show that the unusual behaviors encountered in these systems, typically nonuniversal scaling, are hardly compatible with the hypothesis of a second order phase transition. We then review the various perturbative and early nonperturbative approaches used to investigate these systems. We argue that none of them provides a completely satisfactory description of the three-dimensional critical behavior. We then recall the principles of the nonperturbative approach - the effective average action method - that we have used to investigate the physics of frustrated magnets. First, we recall the treatment of the unfrustrated - O(N) - case with this method. This allows to introduce its technical aspects. Then, we show how this method unables to clarify most of the problems encountered in the previous theoretical descriptions of frustrated magnets. Firstly, we get an explanation of the long-standing mismatch between different perturbative approaches which consists in a nonperturbative mechanism of annihilation of fixed points between two and three dimensions. Secondly, we get a coherent picture of the physics of frustrated magnets in qualitative and (semi-) quantitative agreement with the numerical and experimental results. The central feature that emerges from our approach is the existence of scaling behaviors without fixed or pseudo-fixed point and that relies on a slowing-down of the renormalization group flow in a whole region in the coupling constants space. This phenomenon allows to explain the occurence of generic weak first order behaviors and to understand the absence of universality in the critical behavior of frustrated magnets.