Part I of this article studied the specific heats of planar alternating layered Ising models with strips of strong coupling J_{1} sandwiched between strips of weak coupling J_{2}, to illustrate qualitatively the effects of connectivity, proximity, and enhancement in analogy to those seen in extensive experiments on superfluid helium by Gasparini and co-workers. It was demonstrated graphically that finite-size scaling descriptions hold in a variety of temperature regions including in the vicinity of the two specific heat maxima. Here we provide exact theoretical analyses and asymptotics of the specific heat that support and confirm the graphical findings. Specifically, at the overall or bulk critical point, the anticipated (and always present) logarithmic singularity is shown to vanish exponentially fast as the width of the stronger strips increases.
In order to investigate the effects of connectivity and proximity in the specific heat, a special class of exactly solvable planar layered Ising models has been studied in the thermodynamic limit. The Ising models consist of repeated uniform horizontal strips of width
m connected by sequences of vertical strings of length
n mutually separated by distance
N, with
N=1,2 and
3. We find that the critical temperature
Tc(N,m,n), arising from the collective effects, decreases as
n and
N increase, and increases as
m increases, as it should be. The amplitude
A(N,m,n) of the logarithmic divergence at the bulk critical temperature
Tc(N,m,n) becomes smaller as
n and
m increase. A rounded peak, with size of order
lnm and signifying the one-dimensional behavior of strips of finite width
m, appears when
n is large enough. The appearance of these rounded peaks does not depend on
m as much, but depends rather more on
N and
n, which is rather perplexing. Moreover, for fixed
m and
n, the specific heats are not much different for different
N. This is a most surprising result. For
N=1, the spin-spin correlation in the center row of each strip can be written as a Toeplitz determinant with a generating function which is much more complicated than in Onsager's Ising model. The spontaneous magnetization in that row can be calculated numerically and the spin-spin correlation is shown to have two-dimensional Ising behavior.
The specific heat, energy, and free energy of an infinitely long, square-lattice ferromagnetic Ising strip consisting of
n parallel layers with free boundary conditions and a surface magnetic field
H1=kBTh1 imposed on the last layer, is analyzed for large
n in the light of finite-size scaling theory. It is shown rigorously that the free energy (and, similarly, the energy and specific heat) can be written asymptotically in the scaling form $\ensuremath{\Delta}f(n,t,{h}_{1})\ensuremath{\approx}{n}^{\ensuremath{-}2}(\mathrm{ln}n){W}_{1}(nt,{n}^{\frac{1}{2}}{h}_{1})+{n}^{\ensuremath{-}2}{W}_{2}(nt,{n}^{\frac{1}{2}}{h}_{1})$, where $t=\frac{(T\ensuremath{-}{T}_{c})}{{T}_{c}}$. The scaling functions
Wi(x,y) are computed in explicit closed form and shown to verify all the analyticity and asymptotic requirements anticipated by scaling theory. Furthermore, in the limit $n\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ at fixed $t\ensuremath{\ne}0$, the bulk and surface contributions to the thermodynamic properties are found to account for all except a correction of order ${e}^{\frac{\mathrm{pna}}{\ensuremath{\xi}(T)}}$, where
a is the lattice spacing and $\ensuremath{\xi}(T)$ is the bulk correlation length; the value of the small rational constant
p is interpreted in terms of interference effects between the two opposite boundaries (or "surfaces").
A scaling theory and a related conjecture presented recently by de Gennes and Fisher to predict the effects of walls inserted in two near-critical binary fluid mixtures, are checked theoretically by exact analytic calculations for $n\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\ensuremath{\infty}$, two-dimensional Ising model strips with a surface field,
h1, imposed on the first layer; exact calculations with a second surface field,
hn, imposed on the nth layer are also reported. It is verified, in particular, that the effects on properties observed close to one wall of a second wall at distance
D decay, at the critical point, as
Dd1, where
d is the spatial dimensionality. In addition to the scaling limits, the leading corrections are calculated explicitly and presented graphically.
In this paper, we use the dimer method to obtain the free energy of Ising models consisting of repeated horizontal strips of width
m connected by sequences of vertical strings of length
n mutually separated by distance
N, with
N arbitrary, to investigate the effects of connectivity and proximity on the specific heat. The decoration method is used to transform the strings of
n+1 spins interacting with their nearest neighbors with coupling
J into a pair with coupling
Jˉ between the two spins. The free energy per site is given as a single integral and some results for critical temperatures are derived.
Two-dimensional Ising strips subject to identical surface fields h(1)=h(2) > or =0 are studied for temperatures above and below the bulk critical temperature T(c) and a range of bulk fields h by means of the density-matrix renormalization-group method. In the case of nonvanishing surface fields, the near-critical behavior of the solvation force f(solv), total adsorption Gamma, inverse longitudinal correlation length xi(parallel)( -1) and specific heat C(H) is strongly influenced by the (pseudo) capillary condensation that occurs below T(c). We obtain scaling functions of f(solv), Gamma, and xi(parallel)(-1). C(H) exhibits a weakly rounded singularity on crossing the pseudocoexistence line. We contrast these results with those for the case of free boundaries where, for temperatures slightly below T(c), f(solv) and C(H) exhibit a sharp extremum away from h=0. Our results have direct repercussions for the properties of near-critical Ising films in three dimensions and we argue that the long-ranged solvation (Casimir) force in confined fluids should be more attractive in the neighborhood of the capillary critical point than exactly at the bulk critical point.