Renormalization Group for Critical Phenomena in Complex Networks

We discuss the behavior of statistical models on a novel class of complex “Hanoi” networks. Such modeling is often the cornerstone for the understanding of many dynamical processes in complex networks. Hanoi networks are special because they integrate small-world hierarchies common to many social and economical structures with the inevitable geometry of the real world these structures exist in. In addition, their design allows exact results to be obtained with the venerable renormalization group (RG). Our treatment will provide a detailed, pedagogical introduction to RG. In particular, we will study the Ising model with RG, for which the fixed points are determined and the RG flow is analyzed. We show that the small-world bonds result in non-universal behavior. It is shown that a diversity of different behaviors can be observed with seemingly small changes in the structure of hierarchical networks generally, and we provide a general theory to describe our findings.