Analysis reveals logarithmic increases in interface height under specific boundary conditions for Ising and Potts models, indicating strong entropic effects.
We study the entropic repulsion of the low temperature 3D Ising and Potts interface in an n × n × n n× n × n box with blue boundary conditions on its bottom face (the hard floor), and red boundary conditions on its other five faces. For Ising, Fröhlich and Pfister proved in 1987 that the typical interface height above the origin diverges (non-quantitatively), via correlation inequalities special to the Ising model; no such result was known for Potts. We show for both the Ising and Potts models that the entropic repulsion fully overcomes the potentially attractive interaction with the floor, and obtain a logarithmically diverging lower bound on the typical interface height. This is complemented by a conjecturally sharp upper bound of ⌊ ξ − 1 log n ⌋ ξ ⁻¹log n where ξ ξ is the rate function for a point-to-plane non-red connection under the infinite volume red measure. The proof goes through a coupled random-cluster interface to overcome the potentially attractive interaction with the boundary, and a coupled fuzzy Potts model to reduce the upper bound to a simpler setting where the repulsion is attained by conditioning a no-floor interface to lie in the upper half-space.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Chen et al. (2025) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: