Conventional description of Unconventional Coulomb-Crystal phase transitions in three-dimensional classical O(N) spin-ice

Abstract

We study the phase transition between the high temperature Coulomb phase and the low temperature staggered crystal phase in three dimensional classical O(N) spin-ice model. Compared with the previously proposed CP(1) formalism on the Coulomb-crystal transition of the classical dimer model, our description based on constrained order parameter is more conventional, due to a fundamental difference between the O(N) and the dimer model. A systematic epsilon and 1/N expansion are used to study the universality class of the phase transition, and a stable fixed point is found based on our calculations for large enough N.

5 pages, 2 figures