Criticality in alternating layered Ising models. I. Effects of connectivity and proximity

The specific heats of exactly solvable alternating layered planar Ising models with strips of width m_{1} lattice spacings and "strong" couplings J_{1} sandwiched between strips of width m_{2} and "weak" coupling J_{2}, have been studied numerically to investigate the effects of connectivity and proximity. We find that the enhancements of the specific heats of the strong layers and of the overall or "bulk" critical temperature T_{c}(J_{1},J_{2};m_{1},m_{2}) arising from the collective effects reflect the observations of Gasparini and co-workers in experiments on confined superfluid helium. Explicitly, we demonstrate that finite-size scaling holds in the vicinity of the upper limiting critical point T_{1c} (∝J_{1}/k_{B}) and close to the corresponding lower critical limit T_{2c} (∝J_{2}/k_{B}) when m_{1} and m_{2} increase. However, the residual enhancement, defined via appropriate subtractions of leading contributions from the total specific heat, is dominated (away from T_{1c} and T_{2c}) by a decay factor 1/(m_{1}+m_{2}) arising from the seams (or boundaries) separating the strips; close to T_{1c} and T_{2c} the decay is slower by a factor lnm_{1} and lnm_{2}, respectively.