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.
Tricritical wing coexistence factorization 2026-10-06
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 atAt 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.