Spontaneous layering and power-law order in the three-dimensional fully-packed hard-plate lattice gas

Abstract

We obtain the phase diagram of fully-packed hard plates on a cubic lattice. Each plate covers an elementary plaquette of the cubic lattice and occupies its four vertices, with each vertex of the cubic lattice occupied by exactly one such plate. We consider the general case with fugacities $s_\mu$ for `$\mu$ plates', whose normal is the $\mu$ direction ($\mu = x,y,z$). At and close to the isotropic point, we find, consistent with previous work, a phase with long-range sublattice order. When two of the fugacities $s_{\rm \mu_1}$ and $s_{\mu_2}$ are comparable, and the third fugacity $s_{\mu_{3}}$ is much smaller, we find a spontaneously-layered phase. In this phase, the system breaks up into disjoint slabs of width two stacked along the $\mu_3$ axis. $\mu_1$ and $\mu_2$ plates are preferentially contained entirely within these slabs, while plates straddling two successive slabs have a lower density. In the opposite limit, with $\mu_3 \gg \mu_1 \sim \mu_2$, we find a phase with long-range columnar order, corresponding to simultaneous $Z_2$ symmetry breaking of lattice translation symmetry in directions $\mu_1$ and $\mu_2$. The spontaneously-layered phases display critical behaviour, with power-law decay of correlations in the $\mu_1$ and $\mu_2$ directions when the slabs are stacked in the $\mu_3$ direction, and represent examples of `floating phases' discussed earlier in the context of coupled Luttinger liquids and quasi-two-dimensional classical systems. We ascribe this remarkable behaviour to the constrained motion of defects in this phase, and develop a coarse-grained effective field theoretical understanding of the stability of power-law order in this unusual three-dimensional floating phase.