The effect of bond randomness on tricritical and critical end-point phenomena is studied by renormalization-group theory. In three dimensions, the pure-system tricritical point is replaced by a line segment of second-order transitions dominated by randomness and bounded by a multicritical point and a random-bond tricritical point, which reaches zero temperature at threshold randomness. This topology indicates a violation of the empirical universality principle. The random-bond tricritical point renormalizes onto the fixed distribution of random-field Ising criticality.

• Received 30 December 1994

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.76.4380