Phase Diagram of the Square-Lattice Three-State Potts Antiferromagnet with Staggered Polarization Field

Abstract: We study a square-lattice three-state Potts antiferromagnet with a staggered polarization field at finite temperature. Numerically treating the transfer matrices, we determine two phase boundaries separating the model-parameter space into three parts. We confirm that one of them belongs to the ferromagnetic three-state Potts criticality, which is in accord with a recent prediction, and another to the Ising type; these are both corresponding to the massless renormalization-group flows stemming from the Gaussian fixed points. We also discuss a field theory to describe the latter Ising transition.