Emergent ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ symmetry near a CDW multicritical point

Abstract

We consider the critical behavior associated with incommensurate unidirectional charge-density-wave ordering in a weakly orthorhombic system subject to uniaxial strain as an experimentally significant example of $U(1)\times U(1)$ multicriticality. We show that, depending on microscopic details, the phase diagram can have qualitatively different structures which can involve a vestigial meta-nematic critical point, a pair of tricritical points, a decoupled tetracritical point, or (at least at mean-field level) a bicritical point. We analyze the emergent symmetries in the critical regime and find that these can -- at least in some cases -- involve an emergent ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ order parameter symmetry.

7 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Different critical behaviors in cubic to trigonal and tetragonal perovskites