Semiflexible fully packed loop model and interacting rhombus tilings

Jesper Lykke Jacobsen (1) , Fabien Alet (2, 3)

1 LPTENS - Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l'ENS [École Normale Supérieure]
2 FFC - Fermions Fortement Corrélés (LPT)
3 LPT - Laboratoire de Physique Théorique

Motivated by a recent adsorption experiment [M.O. Blunt et al., Science 322, 1077 (2008)], we study tilings of the plane with three different types of rhombi. An interaction disfavors pairs of adjacent rhombi of the same type. This is shown to be a special case of a model of fully-packed loops with interactions between monomers at distance two along a loop. We solve the latter model using Coulomb gas techniques and show that its critical exponents vary continuously with the interaction strenght. At low temperature it undergoes a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition to an ordered phase, which is predicted from numerics to occur at a temperature T \sim 110K in the experiments.

Domaines: Mécanique statistique [cond-mat.stat-mech]

Jesper Lykke Jacobsen, Fabien Alet. Semiflexible fully packed loop model and interacting rhombus tilings. Physical Review Letters, 2009, 102 (14), pp.145702. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.145702⟩. ⟨hal-00376947⟩