Height representation, critical exponents, and ergodicity in the four-state triangular Potts antiferromagnet

We study the four-state antiferromagnetic Potts model on the triangular lattice. We show that the model has six types of defects which diffuse and annihilate according to certain conservation laws consistent with their having a vector-valued topological charge. Using the properties of these defects, we deduce a 2+2-dimensional height representation for the model and hence show that the model is equivalent to the three-state Potts antiferromagnet on the Kagome lattice and to bond-coloring models on the triangular and hexagonal lattices. We also calculate critical exponents for the ground state ensemble of the model. We find that the exponents governing the spin-spin correlation function and spin fluctuations violate the Fisher scaling law because of constraints on path length which increase the effective wavelength of the spin operator on the height lattice. We confirm our predictions by extensive Monte Carlo simulations of the model using the Wang-Swendsen-Kotecky cluster algorithm. Although this algorithm is not ergodic on lattices with toroidal boundary conditions, we prove that it is ergodic on lattices with free boundary conditions, or more generally on lattices possessing no non-contractible loops of infinite order. To guard against biases introduced by lack of ergodicity, we therefore perform our simulations on both the torus and the projective plane.