Emerging criticality in the disordered three-color Ashkin-Teller model

Abstract

We study the effects of quenched disorder on the first-order phase transition in the two-dimensional three-color Ashkin-Teller model by means of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. We demonstrate that the first-order phase transition is rounded by the disorder and turns into a continuous one. Using a careful finite-size-scaling analysis, we provide strong evidence for the emerging critical behavior of the disordered Ashkin-Teller model to be in the clean two-dimensional Ising universality class, accompanied by universal logarithmic corrections. This agrees with perturbative renormalization-group predictions by Cardy. As a byproduct, we also provide support for the strong-universality scenario for the critical behavior of the two-dimensional disordered Ising model. We discuss consequences of our results for the classification of disordered phase transitions as well as generalizations to other systems.

18 pages, 18 eps figures included, final version as published

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Quantum critical behavior of the superfluid-Mott glass transition
• Ising universality in the two-dimensional Blume-Capel model with quenched random crystal field
• Phase boundary near a magnetic percolation transition
• Monte Carlo simulations of the disordered three-color quantum Ashkin-Teller chain
• Emergent universal critical behavior of the 2D $N$-color Ashkin-Teller model in the presence of correlated disorder
• Relevance of topological disorder on the directed percolation phase transition