The 1/N expansion of the two-particle irreducible (2PI) effective action is
employed to compute universal properties at the second-order phase transition
of an O(N)-symmetric N-vector model directly in three dimensions. At
next-to-leading order the approach cures the spurious small-N divergence of the
standard (1PI) 1/N expansion for a computation of the critical anomalous
dimension eta(N), and leads to improved estimates already for moderate values
of N.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure