Surface critical phenomena in interaction-round-a-face models Original Research Article

A general scheme has been proposed to study the critical behaviour of integrable interaction-round-a-face models with fixed boundary conditions. It has been shown that the boundary crossing symmetry plays an important role in determining the surface free energy. The excess surface specific heat exponent can thus be obtained without explicitly solving the reflection equations for the boundary face weights. For the restricted SOS L-state models of Andrews, Baxter and Forrester the excess surface specific heat exponent is found to be αs = 2 − (L + 1)/4.