A series approach to wetting and layering transitions. III. The chiral clock model

Abstract

For pt.II see ibid., vol.21, p.159-171, (1988). In the third of this triad of papers which study interfacial phase transitions using series expansions the authors treat the wetting transition of an interface in the three-state chiral clock model. Previous work has shown that on a simple cubic lattice at low temperatures the interface wets through a large, possibly infinite, number of layering transitions. They extend the low-temperature series results to an arbitrary number of nearest neighbours and show that, in the mean-field limit of infinite coordination number, only two layering transitions are seen. This is in agreement with numerical solutions of mean-field equations. Hence the mean-field approximation in this case does not provide a correct description of interface behaviour in three dimensions.