Tricritical crossover scaling Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
For the stable sextic Landau free energy , , rescaling gives the minimized order-parameter contribution , where , and . The two functions are . In particular , but . These separate branches and removal of smooth background terms are necessary when using the homogeneous form to infer mean-field critical exponents.
Tricritical wing Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-10-07
For an even sextic Landau free energy perturbed by a conjugate field, a tricritical wing is a phase coexistence surface at nonzero field between ordered minima of different magnitudes. Two symmetry-related wings emerge from the three-phase line at zero field and terminate at ordinary critical edges. They meet the zero-field ordered coexistence sheet at the tricritical point.
Take two nonnegative coexisting minima , put and , and fix . For the sextic Landau free energy with quadratic, quartic, sextic and linear terms, equal stationary minimum values occur at
At these coefficients,
Thus both are global minima. The case gives the zero-field three-phase line, including the negative minimum; the limit gives the tricritical wing critical edge. Reflecting gives the negative-field wing.
A smooth scalar Landau free energy can end a two-phase phase coexistence curve by merging two minima and their intervening maximum. At a generic stable endpoint, its first three derivatives vanish and its fourth derivative is positive. A field shift and two mixed control parameters reduce the local form to a quartic Landau free energy; the order-parameter jump then vanishes and the magnetic susceptibility diverges. This conclusion assumes there is no competing third phase and that the endpoint lies inside the control-parameter domain. It is not a general theorem about every first-order line: a sextic potential with fixed negative quartic coefficient has a symmetry-related ordered coexistence line that ends at a triple point with a finite jump.
In a finite box, retain the constant mode while integrating all nonzero field modes using the Wilsonian coarse-grained statistical Hamiltonian. Below the smallest nonzero momentum, the remaining effective energy is and its Boltzmann weight is precisely the constrained order-parameter free energy weight. Thus the displayed equality holds with consistent field-independent normalization. It is not an identity between a bare statistical Hamiltonian and an unconstrained equilibrium free energy. An analytic polynomial Landau free energy further assumes a homogeneous branch and regular effective coefficients; long-distance fluctuations near and below an upper critical dimension can invalidate that analytic approximation.