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APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 35 » Issue 21
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 35, 1399–1401 (1975)

Random-Field Instability of the Ordered State of Continuous Symmetry

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Yoseph Imry*
Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973

Shang-keng Ma†
Department of Physics and Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92037

Received 12 August 1975; published in the issue dated 24 November 1975

We consider phase transitions in systems where the field conjugate to the order parameter is static and random. It is demonstrated that when the order parameter has a continuous symmetry, the ordered state is unstable against an arbitrarily weak random field in less than four dimensions. The borderline dimensionality above which mean-field-theory results hold is six.

© 1975 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.35.1399
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.35.1399
PACS:

*On leave from the Physics Department, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.

†Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow.

See Also

Comment: G. Grinstein, Ferromagnetic Phase Transitions in Random Fields: The Breakdown of Scaling Laws, Phys. Rev. Lett. 37, 944 (1976).

Comment: Amnon Aharony, Yoseph Imry, and Shang-keng Ma, Lowering of Dimensionality in Phase Transitions with Random Fields, Phys. Rev. Lett. 37, 1364 (1976).

 
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