The Role of Interfaces in the Propagation of Damage in the Confined Ising Model

M. LETICIA RUBIO PUZZO; EZEQUIEL V. ALBANO

Granada, España

Congreso; 7th Granada Seminar on Computational and Statistical Physics; 2002

Instituto "Carlos I" de Física Teórica y Computacional, Universidad de Granada

The propagation of damage in a confined magnetic Ising film, with short range competing magnetic fields h acting at opposite walls, is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Due to the presence of the fields, the film undergoes a wetting transition at a well defined critical temperature Tw(h). In fact, the competing fields causes the occurrence of an interface between magnetic domains of different orientation. For T < Tw(h) (T > Tw(h)) such interface is bounded (unbounded) to the walls, while right at Tw(h) the interface is essentially located at the center of the film.  It is found that the spatio-temporal spreading of the damage becomes considerably enhanced by the presence of the interface, which act as a ´´catalyst´´ of the damage causing an enhancement of the total damaged area. The critical points for damage spreading are evaluated by extrapolation to the thermodynamic limit using a finite-size scaling approach. Furthermore, the wetting transition effectively shifts the location of the damage spreading critical points, as compared with the well known critical temperature of the order-disorder transition characteristic of the Ising model. Such a critical points are found to be placed within the non-wet phase.