Degeneracy induced scaling of the correlation length for periodic models Original Research Article

The broken symmetric phase of scalar models exhibits an infrared fixed point which is induced by the degenerate effective potential. The definition of the correlation length in the infrared regime enables us to determine the type of the phase transition in the model. It is shown that the massive sine-Gordon model exhibits a continuous, while the layered sine-Gordon model has an infinite order Kosterlitz–Thouless type phase transition.