Unconventional Phase Transitions In Random Systems

"In this thesis we study the effects of different types of disorder and quasiperiodic modulations on quantum, classical and nonequilibrium phase transitions. After a brief introduction, we examine the effect of topological disorder on phase transitions and explain a host of violations of the Harris and Imry-Ma criteria that predict the fate of disordered phase transitions. We identify a class of random and quasiperiodic lattices in which a topological constraint introduces strong anticorrelations leading to modifications of the Harris and Imry-Ma criteria for such lattices. We investigate whether or not the Imry-Ma criterion, that predicts that random field disorder destroys phase transitions in equilibrium systems in sufficiently low dimensions, also holds for nonequilibrium phase transitions. We find that the Imry-Ma criterion does not apply to a prototypical absorbing state nonequilibrium transition. In addition, we study the effect of disorder with long-range spatial correlations on the absorbing state phase transition in the contact process. Most importantly, we find that long-range correlations enhance the Griffiths singularities and change the universality class of the transition. We also investigate the absorbing state phase transition of the contact process with quasiperiodic transition rates using a real-space renormalization group which yields a complete theory of the resulting exotic infinite-modulation critical point. Moreover, we study the effect of quenched disorder on a randomly layered Heisenberg magnet by means of a large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations. We find that the transition follows the infinite-randomness critical point scenario. Finally, we investigate the effect of quenched disorder on the first-order phase transition in the N-color quantum Ashkin-Teller model by means of strong-disorder renormalization group theory. We find that disorder rounds the first-order quantum phase transition in agreement with quantum version of the Imry-Ma criterion"--Abstract, page v.