New critical phenomena in 2D quantum gravity

Abstract

We study q = 10 and q = 200 state Potts models on dynamical triangulated lattices and demonstrate that these models exhibit continuous phase transitions, contrary to the first-order transition present on regular lattices. For q = 10 the transition seems to be of 2nd order, while it seems to be of 3rd order for q = 200. For q = 200 the phase transition also induces a transition between typical fractal structures of the piecewise linear surfaces corresponding to the triangulations. The typical surface changes from having a tree-like structure to a fractal structure characterizing pure gravity when the temperature drops below the critical temperature. An investigation of the alignment of spin clusters shows that they are strongly correlated to the underlying fractal structure of the triangulated surfaces.