0000000000138907
AUTHOR
F. F. Haas
Critical Phenomena at the Surface of Systems Undergoing a Bulk First Order Transition: Are They Understood?
Systems that exhibit a first-order phase transition in the bulk, such as binary alloys where the order parameter vanishes discontinuously at some critical value of a control parameter, may show a continuous vanishing of the local order parameter at the surface. This “surface-induced disordering” is described theoretically as a variant of critical wetting, where an interface between the locally disordered surface and the ordered bulk gradually moves towards the bulk. We test this description by Monte Carlo simulations for a body centered cubic model alloy, with interactions between nearest and next nearest neighbors, for which the phase diagram in the bulk has been calculated very accurately…
Surface-induced disorder in body-centered-cubic alloys
We present Monte Carlo simulations of surface induced disordering in a model of a binary alloy on a bcc lattice which undergoes a first order bulk transition from the ordered DO3 phase to the disordered A2 phase. The data are analyzed in terms of an effective interface Hamiltonian for a system with several order parameters in the framework of the linear renormalization approach due to Brezin, Halperin and Leibler. We show that the model provides a good description of the system in the vicinity of the interface. In particular, we recover the logarithmic divergence of the thickness of the disordered layer as the bulk transition is approached, we calculate the critical behavior of the maxima o…
Order and Disorder Phenomena at Surfaces of Binary Alloys
We present recent Monte Carlo results on surfaces of bcc-structured binary alloys which undergo an order-disorder phase transformation in the bulk. In particular, we discuss surface order and surface induced disorder at the bulk transition between the ordered (DO3) phase and the disordered (A2) phase. An intricate interplay between different ordering and segregation phenomena leads to a complex surface behavior, which depends on the orientation of the surface under consideration.