Self-consistent renormalization group approach to continuous phase transitions in alloys: application to ordering in β-brass

A self-consistent (SC) renormalization group approach of the effective medium kind has been developed and applied to the solution of the Ising model (IM). A renormalization group equation in the local potential approximation (LPA) derived previously for spatially homogeneous systems has been extended to the lattice case and supplemented with a self-consistency condition on the pair correlation function. To validate the approach it has been applied to the simple cubic IM and good agreement of the spontaneous magnetization calculated with the use of the SC–LPA equation with the available exact Monte Carlo simulations data has been established. Next the approach has been applied to the bcc IM corresponding to β-brass. With the use of the effective pair interaction parameters from available ab initio calculations the critical temperature, the correlation length and the long range order parameter in the vicinity of the critical point have been calculated in excellent agreement with experimental data. Qualitative and quantitative arguments have been given in support of the suggestion that the experimentally observed decrease of the effective critical exponent of the order parameter in comparison with the universal value is enhanced by the positive value of the second neighbour pair interaction found in the ab initio calculations. (paper)