Universality Aspects of Layering Transitions in Ferromagnetic Blume-Capel Thin Films

Abstract

Critical phenomena and universality behavior of ferromagnetic thin films described by a spin-1 Blume-Capel Hamiltonian has been examined for various thickness values ranging from 3 to 40 layers. Using effective field theory, we have found that crystal field interactions significantly affects the critical value of surface to bulk ratio of exchange interactions $R_c$ at which the critical temperature becomes independent of film thickness $L$. Moreover, we have extracted the shift exponent $\lambda$ from computed data. Based on the results, we have shown that in the presence of surface exchange enhancement, the system may exhibit a dimensional crossover. We have also found that presence of crystal field interactions does not affect the value of $\lambda$. Hence, a ferromagnetic spin-1/2 thin film is in the same universality class with its spin-1 counterpart.

14 pages, 5 figures

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