Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2008/iii/paper-50/1/f/solution

At a tricritical point, both and vanish, while stabilizes the Landau free energy. It separates ordinary continuous transitions for from first-order coexistence for . The zero-field order-parameter jump shrinks to zero as , and the tricritical wings terminate there in the full diagram. For , , minimizing gives and
Two thermal derivatives give the heat-capacity critical exponent , compared with the finite mean-field heat-capacity jump, , at an ordinary quartic transition. The remaining tricritical mean-field critical exponents are , and the mean-field correlation-length critical exponent is . To observe tricritical scaling one must tune the quartic scaling field as well as the thermal field: a generic path with fixed instead has ordinary critical behavior. Its upper critical dimension is three, as the multicritical Ginzburg ratio shows.

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