Critical behavior in the presence of an order-parameter pinning field

Abstract

Can one investigate more efficiently quantum critical behavior by employing a local order-parameter pinning field, which explicitly breaks the symmetry of the model under investigation? To answer this question, the authors consider the two-dimensional square-lattice bilayer quantum Heisenberg model using a world-line quantum Monte Carlo method. The pinning-field approach is found to accurately locate the quantum critical point over a wide range of pinning-field strengths. However, the identification of the quantum critical scaling behavior is found to be complicated by the fact that the pinning field introduces strong corrections to scaling. A renormalization group analysis exhibits important analogies to surface critical phenomena, and a crossover effect to an infinite pinning-field fixed point, which the authors study in detail by simulations of an improved classical lattice model in the three-dimensional Ising universality class. At the infinite pinning-field fixed point, the short-distance expansion of the order-parameter profile exhibits a new universal critical exponent, which characterizes the experimentally relevant critical adsorption on a line defect. This result also implies the presence of slowly decaying scaling corrections, which are analyzed here in detail.