Crossover behaviors in the Ising strips with changeable boundary conditions: Exact variational results

University of Belgrade, Faculty of Physics - P.O.B. 44, 11001 Belgrade, Serbia

Received: 5 June 2012
Accepted: 7 August 2012

Abstract

A critical Ising strip with confining boundaries characterized by arbitrary and different surface magnetic field variables is considered by the exact variational formulation of Mikheev and Fisher. As one of the most important scaling densities in films we study the universal functions of the energy density profiles which exhibit strong nonmonotonous behavior near the confining boundaries. We also examine their short-distance expansion that reveals novel universal amplitudes associated with the distant-wall corrections. They manifest nontrivial crossover behaviors from positive to negative values as the fields variables are freely varied. As an indispensable part of our new formulation of the generalized distant-wall correction de Gennes-Fisher universal amplitude we derive in a self-contained manner within the present approach the Casimir amplitudes that may change their nature twice under the strong influence of surface fields: from repulsive to attractive and vice versa along certain trajectories. Our findings strongly suggest a surprising role of the stress-tensor within one of the distant-wall corrections, given that similar discovery for standard extraordinary and ordinary surface universality classes was based on the conformal invariance symmetry which is broken under the present boundary conditions. We also show that a constituent part of the de Gennes-Fisher amplitude, defined in a generalized sense, is not hyperuniversal in two dimensions, contrary to earlier results for standard boundary conditions in this dimension.