Fan, YuchenXi, NingLiu, ChangleNormand, BruceYu, Rong2024-04-032024-04-032024-04-032024-03-0910.1038/s41535-024-00636-4https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/206901WOS:001181573300001Phase transitions in condensed matter are a source of exotic emergent properties. We study the fully frustrated bilayer Heisenberg antiferromagnet to demonstrate that an applied magnetic field creates a previously unknown emergent criticality. The quantum phase diagram contains four states with distinctly different symmetries, all but one pair separated by first-order transitions. We show by quantum Monte Carlo simulations that the thermal phase diagram is dominated by a wall of discontinuities extending between the dimer-triplet phases and the singlet-containing phases. This wall is terminated at finite temperatures by a critical line, which becomes multicritical where the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition of the dimer-triplet antiferromagnet and the thermal Ising transition of the singlet-triplet crystal phase also terminate. The combination of merging symmetries leads to a 4-state Potts universality not contained in the microscopic Hamiltonian, which we interpret within the Ashkin-Teller model. Our results represent a systematic step in understanding emergent phenomena in quantum magnetic materials, including the "Shastry-Sutherland compound" SrCu2(BO3)2.TechnologyPhysical SciencesLong-Range OrderCritical-PointGround-StateCriticalityModeltext::journal::journal article::research article