Scaling and crossover in a fermion-boson mixture

Thermodynamic behaviour of a mixture of weakly interacting fermions and bosons is investigated in (4 - ε) dimensions by the renormalization group method with a view to study scaling and crossover properties of the system in the tricritical region. Conventional tricritical scaling, first found to breakdown for a classical infinite-component model, is seen to do so more spectacularly in the case of the mixture. Whereas in the infinite-component model, conventional scaling holds in the ordered and disordered phases separately (i.e. with different tricritical exponents), no such thing is possible in either of the phases of the mixture. The breakdown of scaling in the mixture is associated with the dimensionless strength v6 of the 6-point interaction in the effective Hamiltonian which causes the parameters of the renormalized Hamiltonian to depend on two combinations of scaling fields rather than one. The strength v6 is a quantum mechanical parameter being proportional in 3 dimensions to (b3/λT4KF) where λT, KF and b denote, respectively, the boson thermal wavelength, the Fermi momentum of the fermion component and the scattering length associated with the fermion-boson interaction. The square root of this quantity agrees with the non-universality parameter which was found to characterize tricritical amplitude ratios in 3 dimensions in an earlier work. (author). 19 refs, 8 figs