Chaotic renormalization-group trajectories

Under certain conditions, the renormalization-group flow of models in statistical mechanics can change dramatically under just very small changes of given external parameters. This can typically occur close to bifurcations of fixed points, close to the complete disappearance of fixed points, or in regions where the renormalization-group flow becomes chaotic. We present some explicit examples of these phenomena for the case of a Lie group valued spin-model analyzed by means of a variational real-space renormalization group. By directly computing the free energy of these models around the parameter regions in which such nontrivial modifications of the renormalization-group flow occur, we can extract the physical consequences of these phenomena.