Deconfined criticality critically defined

Abstract

We describe characteristic physical properties of the recently introduced class of deconfined quantum critical points. Using some simple models, we highlight observables which clearly distinguish such critical points from those described by the conventional Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson framework: such a distinction can be made quite precisely even though both classes of critical points are strongly coupled, and neither has sharp quasiparticle excitations. We also contrast our classification from proposals by Bernevig et al. (cond-mat/0004291) and Yoshioka et al. (cond-mat/0404427).