Emergent universal critical behavior of the 2D $N$-color Ashkin-Teller model in the presence of correlated disorder

Abstract

We study the critical behavior of the 2D $N$-color Ashkin-Teller model in the presence of random bond disorder whose correlations decays with the distance $r$ as a power-law $r^{-a}$. We consider the case when the spins of different colors sitting at the same site are coupled by the same bond and map this problem onto the 2D system of $N/2$ flavors of interacting Dirac fermions in the presence of correlated disorder. Using renormalization group we show that for $N=2$, a "weakly universal" scaling behavior at the continuous transition becomes universal with new critical exponents. For $N>2$, the first-order phase transition is rounded by the correlated disorder and turns into a continuous one.