Critical and multicritical behavior in the Ising–Heisenberg universality class

Abstract

Critical behavior of three-dimensional classical frustrated antiferromagnets with a collinear spin ordering and with an additional twofold degeneracy of the ground state is studied. We consider two lattice models, whose continuous limit describes a single phase transition with a symmetry class differing from the class of non-frustrated magnets as well as from the classes of magnets with non-collinear spin ordering. A symmetry breaking is described by a pair of independent order parameters, which are similar to order parameters of the Ising and O(N) models correspondingly. Using the renormalization group method, it is shown that a transition is of first order for non-Ising spins. For Ising spins, a second order phase transition from the universality class of the O(2) model may be observed. The lattice models are considered by Monte Carlo simulations based on the Wang–Landau algorithm. The models are a ferromagnet on a body-centered cubic lattice with the additional antiferromagnetic exchange interaction between next-nearest-neighbor spins and an antiferromagnet on a simple cubic lattice with the additional interaction in layers. We consider the cases N = 1, 2, 3 and in all of them find a first-order transition. For the N = 1 case we exclude possibilities of the second order or pseudo-first order of a transition. An almost second order transition for large N is also discussed.