Renormalization group approach to the surface and defect critical behavior in the potts model

Abstract

A simple real-space renormalization group method with two-terminal clusters is used to treat the critical behavior of Potts ferromagnet with free surface and defect plane on the same footing both for square and cubic lattices. For a square lattice, quite different critical behaviors are found for the cases of line defect and free surface. Whenq is larger than three, like the case ofa line type defect in ‘diamond’ hierarchical lattice, the order parameter on a defect line increases discontinuously at the bulk critical point if the defect interaction is sufficiently strong. This behavior, on the contrary, does not occur on the surface of a semi-infinite plane. For a cubic lattice, the phase diagram and renormalization group flow properties are obtained explicitly for bothq=1 (bond percolation) andq=2 (Ising model). In both cases, our calculations whow that the critical behavior on the surface of a semi-infinite system belongs to a different universality class from the critical behavior on the defect plane of a bulk system.