Scaling relations and multicritical phenomena from functional renormalization.

We investigate multicritical phenomena in O(N)+O(M) models by means of nonperturbative renormalization group equations. This constitutes an elementary building block for the study of competing orders in a variety of physical systems. To identify possible multicritical points in phase diagrams with two ordered phases, we compute the stability of isotropic and decoupled fixed point solutions from scaling potentials of single-field models. We verify the validity of Aharony's scaling relation within the scale-dependent derivative expansion of the effective average action. We discuss implications for the analysis of multicritical phenomena with truncated flow equations. These findings are an important step towards studies of competing orders and multicritical quantum phase transitions within the framework of functional renormalization.