Surface critical behaviour and local operators with boundary-induced critical profiles

Abstract

The authors present a simple argument showing that the surface energy density of a semi-infinite d-dimensional spin system has, in general, a leading thermal singularity of the same form, mod T-Tc mod 2- alpha , as the bulk free energy. At bulk criticality energy-energy correlations decay as r-2d parallel to the surface. These results hold for both free and fixed boundary spins, i.e. the 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' transitions. The extraordinary critical behaviour of the magnetisation is the same as that of the energy density. They also confirm and generalise these results in two dimensions with an independent approach based on conformal invariance.