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Published on: October 24, 2017
First-order phase transitions in polymerized phantom membranes
K Essafi1, J-P Kownacki2, D Mouhanna3
1Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-Son, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan and Sorbonne Universités, University Pierre et Marie Curie, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, unité mixte de recherche 7600, F-75005 Paris, France.
Abstract:
The crumpled-to-flat phase transition that occurs in D-dimensional polymerized phantom membranes embedded in a d-dimensional space is investigated nonperturbatively using a field expansion up to order 8 in powers of the order parameter. We get the critical dimension dcr(D) that separates a second-order region from a first-order one everywhere between D=4 and 2. Our approach strongly suggests that the phase transitions that take place in physical membranes are of first order in agreement with most recent numerical simulations.
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