Tricriticality for dimeric Coulomb molecular crystals in ground state

Abstract

We study the ground-state properties of a system of dimers. Each dimer consists in a pair of equivalent charges at a fixed distance, immersed in a neutralizing homogeneous background. All charges interact pairwisely by Coulomb potential. The dimer centers form a two-dimensional rectangular lattice with the aspect ratio α ∈ [0, 1] and each dimer is allowed to rotate around its center. The previous numerical simulations, made for the more general Yukawa interaction, indicate that only two basic dimer configurations can appear: either all dimers are parallel or they have two different angle orientations within alternating (checkerboard) sublattices. As the dimer size increases, two second-order phase transitions, related to two kinds of the symmetry breaking in dimer's orientations, were reported. In this paper, we use a recent analytic method based on an expansion of the interaction energy in Misra functions which converges quickly and provides an analytic derivation of the critical behaviour. Our main result is that there exists a specific aspect ratio of the rectangular lattice α * = 0.71410684000071 . . . which divides the space of model's phases onto two distinct regions. If the lattice aspect ratio α > α * , we recover both types of the secondorder phase transitions and find that they are of mean-field type with the critical exponent β = 1/2. If α < α * , the phase transition associated with the discontinuity of dimer's angles on alternating sublattices becomes of first order. For α = α * , the firstand second-order phase transitions meet at the tricritical point, characterized by the different critical index β = 1/4. Such phenomenon is known from literature about the Landau theory of one-component fields, but in our two-component version the scenario is more complicated: the component which is already in the symmetry-broken state at the tricritical point also interferes and exhibits unexpectedly the mean-field singular behaviour.