Getting rid of the ghosts: a toy-model of membrane melting

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the thermal fluctuation theory of crystalline membranes, identifying a fixed point that models membrane melting and comparing melted membrane properties to fluid membranes, avoiding common ghost issues.

Contribution

It introduces a new fixed point model for membrane melting and provides a ghost-free formulation of correlation functions for fluid membranes derived from crystalline melting.

Findings

The fixed point P2 describes membrane melting effectively.

Melted membrane properties align with fluid membrane characteristics.

A ghost-free approach to correlation functions is developed.

Abstract

The theory of thermal fluctuations in crystalline membranes is put under scrutiny. In particular, the two critical regimes of the renormalisation group diagram, which are often left out of the discussion because of their instability in one direction, are examined in details. After studying the proper Goldstone mode counting around each of them, the properties of the fluctuations dominating the large scale spectrum are analysed. This shows that the fixed point P2 is a good candidate to describe the melting of a crystalline membrane. The properties of the melted membrane are then compared to the known properties of fluid membranes. As a byproduct of this analysis, we show that the generation of a fluid membrane by melting a bidimensional crystal allows to formulate its correlation functions without being plagued by the ghosts that inevitably show up in the usual Canham-Helfrich action relying on the Monge parametrisation.