Phys. Rev. B 72, 184408 (2005) [7 pages]Degeneracy and strong fluctuation-induced first-order phase transition in the dipolar pyrochlore antiferromagnetReceived 13 July 2005; published 7 November 2005 We show that a continuous set of degenerate critical soft modes strongly enhances the first-order character of a fluctuation-induced first-order transition in the pyrochlore dipolar Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Such a degeneracy seems essential to explain the strong first-order transition recently observed in Gd2Sn2O7. We present some evidence from Monte Carlo simulations and a perturbative renormalization group expansion. © 2005 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.72.184408
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.72.184408
PACS:
75.10.Hk
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