XY frustrated systems: continuous exponents in discontinuous phase transitions

XY frustrated magnets exhibit an unsual critical behavior: they display scaling laws accompanied by nonuniversal critical exponents and a negative anomalous dimension. This suggests that they undergo weak first order phase transitions. We show that all perturbative approaches that have been used to investigate XY frustrated magnets fail to reproduce these features. Using a nonperturbative approach based on the concept of effective average action, we are able to account for this nonuniversal scaling and to describe qualitatively and, to some extent, quantitatively the physics of these systems.