Seminarium Fizyki Materii Skondensowanej

We consider interfacial phenomena accompanying bulk quantum phasetransitions in presence of surface fields. We argue that the surfacecontribution to the system free energy involves a singularitycharacteristic of an interfacial phase transition, occurring below thebulk transition temperature Tc. Relying on a phenomenological effectiveinterfacial model we compute the interfacial phase diagram and extract thevalues of the exponents describing the leading interfacial singularitiesin spatial dimensionality d ≥ 3.