Decimation Studies of Bloch Electrons in a Magnetic Field: Higher Order Limit Cycles Underlying the Phase Diagram

Abstract

A decimation method is applied to the tight binding model describing the two dimensional electron gas with next nearest neighbor interaction in the presence of an inverse golden mean magnetic flux. The critical phase with fractal spectrum and wave function exists in a finite window in two-dimensional parameter space. There are special points on the boundaries as well as inside the critical phase where the renormalization flow exhibits higher order limit cycles. Our numerical results suggest that most of the critical phase is characterized by a strange attractor of the renormalization equations.