Critical properties of projected SO(5) models at finite temperatures

We consider the projected SO(5) bosonic model introduced in order to connect the SO(5) theory of high-$T_c$ superconductivity with the physics of the Mott-insulating gap, and derive the corresponding effective functional describing low-energy degrees of freedom. At the antiferromagnetic-superconducting transition, SO(5) symmetry-breaking effects due to the gap are purely quantum mechanical and become irrelevant in the neighborhood of a possible finite-temperature multicritical point separating the normal from the antiferromagnetic and the superconducting phases. A difference in the magnon and hole-pair mobility always takes the system away from the SO(5)-symmetric fixed point towards a region of instability, and the phase transition between the normal and the two ordered phases becomes first order before merging into the antiferromagnetic-superconducting line. Quantum fluctuations at intermediate temperatures, while introducing symmetry-breaking terms in the case of equal mobilities, tend to cancel the symmetry-breaking effects in the case of different mobilities.