Surface Critical Phenomena in Interaction-Round-a-Face Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a general method to analyze surface critical phenomena in integrable interaction-round-a-face models, emphasizing boundary effects and deriving surface critical exponents without solving complex equations.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme leveraging boundary crossing symmetry to determine surface free energy and critical exponents in interaction-round-a-face models.

Findings

Surface specific heat exponent for restricted SOS models: α_s=2-(L+1)/4

Boundary crossing symmetry is crucial for surface critical behavior analysis

Method avoids solving reflection equations explicitly

Abstract

A general scheme has been proposed to study the critical behaviour of integrable interaction-round-a-face models with fixed boundary conditions. It has been shown that the boundary crossing symmetry plays an important role in determining the surface free energy. The surface specific heat exponent can thus be obtained without explicitly solving the reflection equations for the boundary face weights. For the restricted SOS $L$-state models of Andrews, Baxter and Forrester the surface specific heat exponent is found to be $\alpha_s=2-(L+1)/4$.