Topological Defects on Fluctuating Surfaces: General Properties and the Kosterlitz-Thouless Transition

Abstract

We investigate the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition for hexatic order on a free fluctuating membrane and derive both a Coulomb gas and a sine-Gordon Hamiltonian to describe it. The Coulomb-gas Hamiltonian includes charge densities arising from disclinations and from Gaussian curvature. There is an interaction coupling the difference between these two densities, whose strength is determined by the hexatic rigidity, and an interaction coupling Gaussian curvature densities arising from the Liouville Hamiltonian resulting from the imposition of a covariant cutoff. In the sine-Gordon Hamiltonian, there is a linear coupling between a scalar field and the Gaussian curvature. We discuss gauge-invariant correlation function for hexatic order and the dielectric constant of the Coulomb gas. We also derive renormalization group recursion relations that predict a transition with decreasing bending rigidity $\kappa$.

REVTEX, 45 pages with 11 postscript figures compressed using uufiles. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. E

References in corpus (4)

• Measure Factors, Tension, and Correlations of Fluid Membranes
• Sine-Gordon Field Theory for the Kosterlitz-Thouless Transitions on Fluctuating Membranes
• Defects in Superfluids, Superconductors and Membranes
• Kosterlitz-Thouless Transitions on Fluctuating Surfaces

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