Monte Carlo simulations of the disordered three-color quantum Ashkin-Teller chain
arXiv:1612.05617 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.95.054403
Abstract
We investigate the zero-temperature quantum phase transitions of the disordered three-color quantum Ashkin-Teller spin chain by means of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the first-order phase transitions of the clean system are rounded by the quenched disorder. For weak inter-color coupling, the resulting emergent quantum critical point between the paramagnetic phase and the magnetically ordered Baxter phase is of infinite-randomness type and belongs to the universality class of the random transverse-field Ising model, as predicted by recent strong-disorder renormalization group calculations. We also find evidence for unconventional critical behavior in the case of strong inter-color coupling, even though an unequivocal determination of the universality class is beyond our numerical capabilities. We compare our results to earlier simulations, and we discuss implications for the classification of phase transitions in the presence of disorder.
9 pages, 9 eps figures included
References in corpus (13)
- Rare region effects at classical, quantum, and non-equilibrium phase transitions
- Quantum Griffiths effects and smeared phase transitions in metals: theory and experiment
- Quantum Griffiths effects in itinerant Heisenberg magnets
- Effects of dissipation on a quantum critical point with disorder
- Theory of the Quantum Critical Fluctuations in Cuprates
- Infinite-randomness quantum critical points induced by dissipation
- Discovery of Griffiths phase in itinerant magnetic semiconductor Fe_{1-x}Co_xS_2
- Theory of smeared quantum phase transitions
- Quantum phase transitions of the diluted O(3) rotor model
- Quantum critical behavior of the superfluid-Mott glass transition
- Rounding by disorder of first-order quantum phase transitions: emergence of quantum critical points
- Emerging criticality in the disordered three-color Ashkin-Teller model
- Rounding of a first-order quantum phase transition to a strong-coupling critical point