Aperiodic extended surface perturbations in the Ising model

Abstract

We study the influence of an aperiodic extended surface perturbation on the surface critical behaviour of the two-dimensional Ising model in the extreme anisotropic limit. The perturbation decays as a power of the distance from the free surface with an oscillating amplitude following some aperiodic sequence. The asymptotic density is 1/2 so that the mean ampltitude vanishes. The relevance of the perturbation is discussed by combining scaling arguments of Cordery and Burkhardt for the Hilhorst-van Leeuwen model and Luck for aperiodic perturbations. The relevance-irrelevance criterion involves the decay exponent of the perturbation, the wandering exponent which governs the fluctuation of the sequence and the bulk correlation length exponent. Analytical results are obtained for the surface magnetization which displays a rich variety of critical behaviours. The results are checked through a numerical finite-size-scaling study. They show that second-order effects must be taken into account in the discussion of the relevance-irrelevance criterion. The scaling behaviours of the first gap and the surface energy are also discussed.